The Trouble-Makers (3 page)

I
T ENDED, OF COURSE
, in Clare’s bringing her books down to the kitchen and spreading them about on the table where Katharine was chopping onions against time.

“It’s a kind of verbal adjective, you see,” Katharine explained all over again, her eyes smarting with the onion smell. “‘To be known’—‘Knowable’—something like that. So it has to agree with the noun. It’s not a verb in the way ‘She knows’ is a verb.”

“‘She
doesn’t
know,’ I’d say,” remarked Flora smugly from where she stood, homework all finished, drawing geometrical patterns in a scattering of spilt salt on the dresser. “Mummy, shall I do my practising before supper?”

Katharine did a swift calculation. If there was to be a quarrel—and what with supper late
and
Clare crying over her
gerundives
there almost certainly would be—then Flora’s practising after supper might well be the last straw (“Why on earth can’t that child get her practising done earlier? Can’t we have
any
peace in this house, ever?”) On the other hand, if Flora was occupied at the piano, then she couldn’t also be irritating her father by asking questions, or arguing—unwittingly rubbing salt on the surface of a mind already raw and exposed from quarrelling with Katharine.

Katharine felt real tears for a moment soothing away the stinging pain of the onion-tears. Real tears, and no time to indulge them, what with the chops to get on, and Clare wanting to know how a gerundive was different from a passive infinitive, and the potatoes already melting on the outside, yet hard as rocks in the middle—all this week’s batch had been like that—and Flora still leaning on the door waiting for her mother to say Yes or No about the practising, and now—ye Gods, it only wanted that!—now the telephone ringing.

When Katharine put the receiver down and went back to the kitchen, she could only hope that her daughters did not notice the terrible relief that she could not keep from her voice.

“That was Daddy,” she told them. “He says he’ll be very late, and not to wait supper for him. So leave your practising till afterwards, if you like, Flora—and Clare, you leave your Latin. I’ll have plenty of time to help you after supper.”

She would, too; because now it didn’t matter about lighting the sitting-room fire, or cooking cabbage (no one but Stephen liked it), or making things look tidy and welcoming. It was like a sudden holiday—and all because her husband was being kept late at work. When—where in her marriage had she come to feel like this? When had Stephen’s homecoming changed from a pleasant climax to the day, and become an anxious deadline? When had her desire to make things happy and comfortable for him in the evenings changed to a compulsive feeling that she had
got
to make things happy and comfortable for him in the evenings? Was it since she had started working again, and was always rushed? Or had it come gradually over the years? …

“Mummy!”

Nine-year-old Jane this time, darting into the kitchen as quick and bright-eyed as a field-mouse, her straight-cut dark hair misted over with raindrops. “Mummy, me and Angela have been having such a
super
time! You know where the lamp shines over the wall at the bottom of their garden? Well, you can
read
by it! Did you know? So we took the little table out of Angela’s greenhouse, and——”

“But darling, you’re soaking!” Katharine ran her hand over her daughter’s jersey. “You’ll have to change before supper. I’d forgotten you were at Angela’s. You had a nice time, did you? And was Angela’s mother there——?”

Katharine cut short the seemingly innocent question. Always, always she must be on guard against pumping Jane for inside information about the Prescotts’ domestic troubles, for the temptation to do so was tremendous. This evening, for instance, she was dying to know if Mary Prescott had succeeded in
dawdling home slowly enough to avoid seeing her husband; and if not, had there been a quarrel? Had they been shouting at each other, or going about in icy silence? Not being able to ask Jane all was like watching a long-awaited instalment of a serial story disappearing into the dustbin.

But after all Jane very likely knew nothing about the Prescotts’ quarrels. Perhaps even Angela didn’t, in spite of everything that was said about children’s sensitiveness to atmosphere in the home. If children were really so sensitive, mused Katharine ruefully, then how was it that they invariably asked their father for complicated and time-consuming favours at exactly the moment when he had pinched his thumb in the car door, or was frantically searching for an urgently needed book? It often seemed to Katharine that the average child, healthily encased in a carapace of total selfishness, could walk unscathed through a domestic atmosphere that you could cut with a knife.

“No. Yes. I didn’t see her.” Jane’s answer broke in on Katharine’s speculations. “A sort of grandmother person gave us tea,” she continued conversationally. “A
much
nicer tea than Mrs Prescott gives us. Toast, and real honey in a
honeycomb
! I wish
we
had a grandmother.”

“I’ll put it on the grocery list next week,” promised Katharine absently. “The honeycomb, I mean, not the grandmother. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Now do run upstairs, dear, and take off your wet things. I’m just dishing up.”

By nine o’clock the two younger girls were in bed and only Clare was left—no longer crying, but looking pale and inky, and bedraggled, and only just starting on her French. She was still working at the kitchen table, and watching her, Katharine wondered, as she had often done before, whether to curse that triumphant day when Clare had scraped through the eleven-plus and won herself a place at the grammar school. The secondary modern would have presented other problems, of course—but wouldn’t they at least have been more cheerful ones? Wouldn’t it simply be more
fun
to have a thirteen-
year-old
that you had to scold for wearing lipsticks and high heels,
rather than one like this, inky and sodden with crying, yet still refusing to give up; still bravely, mercilessly, trying to suck encouragement, information and moral support from one’s own jaded and depleted store? The pile of ironing to be done on her right—the pile of Clare’s difficulties to be solved on her left—and neither seeming to get any less, no matter how Katharine worked on them.

And, of course, into the midst of this depressing scene it
would
be Stella, who must plunge, radiating, as usual, an air of having tramped miles across the moors to get here—actually she came from four doors up. So here she was, bursting uninvited through the back door, surging into the small kitchen, and flinging to Katharine a breezy greeting as from wider, nobler spaces, and leaving the scullery door open into the bargain. Katharine went to shut it, the wind whipping round her feet, and came back to invite her visitor to sit down.

Stella, however, was already seated, her feet stretched out under the ironing board, her eyes greedily fastened on Clare’s French grammar. Katharine knew that look. Ever since Stella had sent her own children to a progressive boarding school, snatching them from under the very jaws of the eleven-plus (just in time to save them from failing, said the neighbours, and just in time to save them from the grammar school treadmill said Stella), she had been bubbling over with self-satisfied condemnation of what she now referred to as the educational rat-race. Since Katharine well knew that this tirade could be triggered off by the mere sight of a tattered geography book on a chair, she waited in trepidation to see what would be the effect of the present scene. The whole thing might have been laid on for Stella’s especial delectation—the slouching, heavy-eyed grammar school girl, the inky books, the lateness of the hour…. In an attempt to avert the armoury of barbed condolences which were about to descend on the unsuspecting Clare, Katharine resorted to swift diversionary tactics, such as offering her visitor coffee, noisily filling the kettle for same, and then asking loudly and enthusiastically after Jack and Mavis in their co-educational paradise.

Oh, they were fine, Stella assured her. Just fine. Getting on marvellously. Loving every minute.

As to which there seemed no more to be said. That was the trouble with Stella now; by sending her children to a school so remote geographically and so Utopian in operation, she had, as it were, put herself outside the conversational orbit of her former friends. All the dear, familiar topics—the problems about bedtimes, teachers, boy-friends, homework—all these now extracted from Stella only one comment, always the same: “Well, you see, at Wetherby Hall that sort of thing simply doesn’t arise”. This seemed to apply to absolutely everything, from sexual precocity to not liking custard, and consequently left extraordinarily little to talk about to her fellow mothers. Stella’s interest in other mother’s problems was still unabated, it is true; but there was a sort of gap where her own should have been.

So Katharine struggled to think of something else to talk about. No inspiration came to her, except to send Clare to bed; and that proved an unfortunate move. As Clare slowly piled one battered book on top of another preparatory to taking them upstairs, Stella’s face took on a beaky, excited look, like a terrier, as she scented the educational rat-race:

“Do you always have as much homework as this, Clare?” she asked, with monstrous sympathy “Don’t you get terribly tired?”

Clare thought this over in her slow way.

“Not terribly,” she answered at last, as though she had measured the word against some exact scale before rejecting it. “It’s just on Thursdays, you see. We have four homeworks on Thursdays, with geometry
and
Latin. Latin always takes me ages.”

“Mavis doesn’t have any homework at all,” responded Stella, as if this fact should somehow lighten Clare’s problem. “In fact, she doesn’t even have to go to lessons if she doesn’t want to. And the funny thing is, she finds she learns
more
that way than when she was being forced into it! Isn’t that odd?”

The patronising cat! thought Katharine crossly: she doesn’t
think it’s odd at all; she’s just trying to show us how marvellous
her
methods are compared with ours! She was immediately shamed by the look of clear, uncomplicated interest which Clare had turned on their guest. Stella, too, must have been a little taken aback, for she pressed her point home clumsily: “Don’t you think
you’d
learn more, Clare, if you were at a school like that, where they didn’t
force
you?”

Clare was silent for a moment, her grey eyes thoughtful under the tear-swollen lids.

“No,” she said at last. “I don’t think I would. I think I’d
mean
to work, but I’d keep not doing it.” She smiled a little apologetically: “But I expect that’s just me. I expect Mavis is different.”

Stella looked almost affronted at Clare’s total lack of defensiveness; her complete unawareness that either she or her way of life were under fire. Stella turned towards Katharine almost pleadingly, as to a fellow warrior who, although an enemy, did at least know that there was a war on:

“Don’t
you
find it tiring, yourself?” she enquired. “I mean, having them hanging around doing homework all the evening like this?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Katharine evasively, picking up the iron again. “It’s not much different in the holidays when they’re hanging around doing something else. Or doing nothing—that’s the worst of all, don’t you think? When they have nothing to do.”

“Well, of course, with Mavis and Jack that simply doesn’t arise,” said Stella, stretching out her long legs as smugly and luxuriously as a cat, but with much less dexterity: the ironing board lurched under Katharine’s hand and the kitchen table shuddered: “Mavis and Jack come home so full of interests and enthusiasms that they simply don’t know what boredom
is.”

“What sort of interests?” asked Katharine, with genuine curiosity, while she readjusted the toppling ironing board; “Things they do indoors, do you mean, like painting and Meccano and things, or do they go out a lot?”

“Everything,”
declared Stella with the emphatic vagueness
which characterised most of her assertions about her children. “Every kind of interest you can think of.”

Katharine quelled her impulse to meet this challenge by thinking of interests so outrageous as to force Stella to be more specific. Instead, she finished sending Clare to bed—odd how Clare’s dreamy obedience took up more time and energy, more nagging and pushing, than all Flora’s self-assertiveness or Jane’s mischief—and poured out two cups of coffee. Stella stretched again as she took her cup—but Katharine was prepared for it this time, with a firm grip on both iron and board. Soon they were deep in a discussion of the manifold advantages accruing from a coffee-grinder—which Stella had got too—as compared with the superfluousness of a cream-making machine, which only Katharine had got.

Stella was just in the middle of explaining that real cream was quite cheap nowadays, and that anyway the top of the milk was just as good, also that ordinary milk was really nicer than cream anyway, and contained more protein, when Katharine heard a very small knock on the front door. Unfortunately, Stella hadn’t heard it, so after one or two vain attempts to interrupt, Katharine simply had to leave the room in the middle of hearing about the vitamin content of skim milk. She hurried across the hall just as the very small knock was being repeated a second—or perhaps even a third—time.

It was Angela Prescott, in bedroom slippers and with a winter coat pulled on over her pyjamas. She looked white and rather wide-eyed against the background of rainy darkness, and at first she seemed to have some difficulty in explaining her errand.

“Please—do you think——? That is, do you know where Mummy is?” she asked. “You see, I don’t know what to do. I think something’s happened.”

“C
OME IN
, A
NGELA
,” said Katharine, reaching out to draw the child towards her. “Come into the warm and tell me what’s the matter.”

But Angela shook her head. Shivering yet obstinate, she would not even come under the shelter of the doorway.

“No,” she said. “No, I must go back. You see, I think something’s happened. I—I only wondered if you knew where Mummy was?”

With sudden uneasiness. Katharine remembered her last sight of Mary Prescott that evening—creeping, dawdling, killing time under the street lamp so as not to reach home in time to encounter her husband. She remembered with compunction the gusto with which she had listened to Mary’s account of this latest quarrel with Alan—a quarrel which sounded just like all the others that Mary had related over the years. Or did it? Hadn’t there been something odd, and strained, in Mary’s manner? …

Certainly Angela must not be allowed to go back alone to whatever was the mysterious trouble next door. Telling the child to wait for a moment, Katharine hurriedly returned to the kitchen, and explained to Stella briefly what had happened, and that she must go back with Angela at once.

Stella’s face lit up. Other people’s troubles were like nourishment to her—something concentrated and quick-acting out of a jar. She would listen to no argument but that she must come too—“You might need my help,” she explained, with shining eyes.

So it could not have been more than a minute or two before Katharine, Stella and Angela were all filing in through the Prescotts’ narrow hall, the facsimile of Katharine’s own, and
into their living-room, which was cold and untidy, and looked as if no one had been in it all day.

Once under her own roof, and in familiar surroundings, Angela became more communicative. Prompted by a good deal of questioning, she managed to give some sort of account of the situation that was troubling her.

Her mother was out; that was the first thing; had been out all the evening. Not that this was so unusual, but her father was out too, and neither of then had told Angela anything about it, or had left any supper for her, or told her to go to bed at the usual time, or any of the things they usually did. They hadn’t even argued with each other about whether they
should
go out and leave her, which was apparently a familiar, and therefore comforting, prelude to their outings. “There’s usually such a
fuss,
you see,” said Angela nostalgically. “About me, and about Mummy not being ready in time, and about the fires being on, or off, and about locking or not locking the back door. I can’t understand how they could have just gone, without any fuss at all.”

No, she hadn’t seen either of them when she came in from school, though of course her father might have been in his study, she hadn’t looked. Auntie Pen had come to give her and Jane their tea, and No, she didn’t know if Auntie Pen had been asked to come—she hadn’t thought anything about it, and anyway Auntie Pen had seemed in a terrible hurry, she had gone away again while Angela and Jane were still eating. And then they’d been playing in the garden, and then Angela had been doing her homework, and it was only when it was bedtime, and there was no one anywhere, that she’d begun to worry.

“So I packed my satchel and polished my shoes ready for tomorrow,” continued Angela. “And then I brushed my teeth and I went to bed. I hung up my dress, too,” she concluded, virtuously.

Of course, reflected Katharine. That’s what a frightened child would be sure to do—to obey punctiliously, and all by herself, the rules that usually had to be enforced by constant
nagging: the rules that hold together the threatened
framework
.

“But you didn’t go to sleep?” prompted Katharine, and Angela agreed that she hadn’t. She’d lain in bed for a while, listening, and slowly coming to the conclusion that “something had happened.” So she’d got up and come next-door to Katharine. That was all. Angela finished her story and looked expectantly at Katharine, with a child’s supreme and arrogant confidence in the adult’s power—and duty—to explain, to reassure, to put matters right.

Katharine quailed. Angela’s expectant gaze, combined with the total lack of data on which to base any sort of action, intimidated her. But Stella was made of sterner—or more inquisitive—stuff.

“I think we should go all over the house,” she announced decisively and with relish. “You never know.”

“They might have left a note or something,” hastily interpolated Katharine, anticipating that “you never know” might be invested by Angela with all sorts of unnerving implications. She wished she knew the child better, so that she might have some idea of the probable direction and extent of her imagination. She wished, too, that Angela could have been left out of the search; but Stella was already striding up the stairs (“We’ll start at the top—do the thing systematically”) with Angela close on her heels.

The general aspect of the upstairs rooms was one of untidiness and neglect—bedclothes hastily pulled up, assorted garments draped over the chairs, dust filming all the furniture. Stella was as outspoken in her criticism as she dared to be in Angela’s hearing. Too outspoken, it seemed to Katharine; but then Katharine had often reflected that Stella would be a more amiable person if she had either fewer convictions or else less of the courage of them.

“You’d never think, would you,” observed Stella “that Mary had
nothing
to do but run the house? No job—nothing! I wonder what she
does
with herself all day?”

“She’s pretty busy, you know, really,” answered Katharine,
rather repressively. It wasn’t true, of course, but she felt a good deal of sympathy for Mary’s ineffectual housekeeping. For who better than Katharine knew the demoralising effect of a quarrel with one’s husband? How it made one no longer care whether the carpets were swept or the furniture shining: whether the cushions looked better this way or that way, and whether books and papers were piled sideways on the shelves. Quarrelling could do more damage to the appearance of a house than a party for fifty people, all drunk. And the
time
it took, too! First the shouting, and the slamming doors: then the angry, secret crying … the not speaking to each other. And then the long, long brooding, going over and over what he’d said, and what you’d said, and what you
should
have said if only you’d thought of it in time. Yes, on second thoughts, Mary probably
was
a busy woman.

Downstairs now, with Angela almost falling over their feet with her closeness, they searched first the living-room and then the kitchen, where the remains of the toast and honey tea were still littering the table. Katharine wished that Stella wouldn’t keep looking into cupboards and under tables. It was absurd, and surely full of frightening implications for Angela—although the child made no comment, and indeed peered into all these ridiculous corners with an avidity
apparently
as great as Stella’s own.

It was in Alan’s study that they came upon the bloodstains: like red ink spilled across his desk, and like brown rust stains on the carpet beneath. For a moment Katharine stared at them quite without surprise, feeling, ridiculously, that this was just what she had expected to find all along. Her total lack of
emotion
made her glance nervously at Stella, as if seeking some clue as to how she ought to look, to behave, in a situation like this; she felt like an unaccustomed church-goer, surreptitiously watching for clues from his neighbours as to when to kneel, when to stand up, when to join in the singing.

But Stella was staring at the desk just as helplessly as Katharine: her face, too, failed to show any appropriate emotion. If anything, she looked rather disapproving, as if
this was just another example of Mary’s slatternly
housekeeping
, like the dust and unmade beds upstairs.

And then, quite quickly, the shock began to lift, and Katharine felt astonishment flowing back into her like blood into a numbed limb. But still she could not feel horror. Once again, and even more strongly, she felt the total lack of data as a constricting force all round her, paralysing action. What
could
you do—what could you feel, if it came to that—when you had no idea what had happened? Ring the doctor? But there was no patient for him to come to. Ring the police? But to tell them what? And anyway, supposing Alan had simply cut himself accidentally? Katharine could imagine his cold fury at finding himself on the front page of the local paper as a result of police intervention. Besides, Mary was Katharine’s friend; and
supposing
… Katharine would not let herself finish this supposition, even in her own mind, but she knew very well it would all add up to not ringing the police. Not without seeing Mary first, anyway.

But
something
must be done. They couldn’t just stand there staring at the bloodstains all night. They must fetch someone—ring someone. Who was this Auntie Pen person that Angela had been talking about? She must surely know something about Mary’s and Alan’s whereabouts since she had come in to see to Angela’s tea—had presumably been asked to do so. Was she on the phone? …

It was only now, on turning to ask Angela about Auntie Pen, that Katharine realised that the child hadn’t followed them into this room at all. What a terribly lucky thing, considering how she had followed like a shadow in and out of all the other rooms. Motioning Stella to follow her, she walked out into the hall, carefully closing the study door behind her.

“Angela!” she called; and after a moment’s pause the child came out of the kitchen, quite slowly, and licking her fingers. She must have been helping herself to the bread and honey still on the kitchen table.

“Angela,” said Katharine—a little too brightly, perhaps, a
little too reassuringly—and was it obvious that she was standing in such a way as to block the door of the study? “Angela—you know you told us your Auntie Pen was here at teatime. Do you know where she lives? Has she a telephone number?”

Was it only Katharine’s anxious imagination, or was Angela looking a little guarded? But she answered quite readily.

“Oh yes. It’s in the book. Can she come, do you think? I’d like her to come.”

Quite absurdly reassured by this, and feeling that simply by wanting Auntie Pen to come, Angela had lifted an enormous load of responsibility from her, Katharine’s shoulders,
Katharine
went eagerly to the telephone. As she waited, listening to the ringing tone, she remembered that this Auntie Pen must be the “sort of grandmother person” referred to by Jane. Was she an old lady, then? Too old to be expected to help with a problem like this? Katharine’s doubt subsided at the warm briskness of the voice that was now saying “Hullo?” Old or not, this would be a person who could cope.

Auntie Pen said she would come at once. That is to say, it would take her three-quarters of an hour, and could Katharine stay with Angela until she arrived? She did not ask what had happened—very luckily, for with Angela hanging around like this Katharine did not see how she could have explained very much. Nor did Auntie Pen seem surprised to be thus summoned: indeed, Katharine could have fancied that she had been waiting for just such a phone call, all ready, and with suitcase packed.

As soon as she heard that Auntie Pen was coming, Angela seemed to relax; to realise suddenly that she was very sleepy. Of her own accord she went back to bed, leaving Katharine and Stella downstairs.

It seemed a very long time that Katharine and Stella were sitting in the Prescotts’ sitting-room waiting for the front-door bell to ring. Stella had lit the gas fire, but it was making little headway against the day-long coldness of the room; and, oddly, there seemed to be nothing to talk about. Both women were uneasily aware that the breath of possible tragedy had put
Mary temporarily out of range of the light-hearted, catty gossip which usually formed the staple of their conversation—indeed the very cement of their friendship, Katharine
sometimes
ruefully admitted. It was no longer possible, with those unexplained bloodstains in the adjoining room, to discuss Mary’s inadequacies as wife or housekeeper; it was not even possible to remark on Angela’s rather odd and secretive demeanour throughout the proceedings. Normally, Stella loved to spot signs of insecurity in other people’s children; she brought to it all the enthusiasm and proselyting expertise of a keen gardener spotting greenfly on somebody else’s roses. Katharine could already see the beginning of frustration on Stella’s face; could hear it in the cracking of her joints as she moved her long limbs restlessly.
Bother
Mary, she was almost visibly thinking:
Why
must she get her wretched husband murdered or driven to suicide or something; now we shan’t be able to say anything nasty about either of them for weeks and weeks.

Katharine filled in some of the uneasy minutes of waiting by going back to her own home to make sure that the children were asleep, and to leave a brief and rather confusing note for Stephen explaining where she was in case he came in before her. By the time she came back, Stella had made herself more at ease, sitting on the floor in front of the fire, her legs stretched out before her, and reading a copy of
Health
for
All.
As soon as she saw Katharine, she embarked on a forceful and argumentative dissertation to the effect that drinking two gallons of yoghourt a day wouldn’t necessarily make you live to be a hundred and fifty. Since it had never occurred to Katharine to suppose that it would, the forcefulness of the argument was somewhat wasted on her, but all the same she was pleased to find Stella so much herself again after the shock; and the time passed really quite pleasantly until they were interrupted by a sharp, decisive ring at the front door, and knew that Auntie Pen had arrived.

Katharine could not have said exactly what she had expected Auntie Pen to look like—indeed, she had deliberately not allowed herself to build up too definite a picture on the
basis of that reassuring voice on the telephone. But with all her caution, all her refraining from over-optimism, she had never dreamed that Auntie Pen’s appearance would give her a shock like this. For there in the doorway, framed unmistakably against the misty rain-drenched light from the street lamp, stood the black-coated woman whose eyes Katharine had so
disconcertingly
met in the bus queue this very evening.