The Trouble-Makers (12 page)

Was she being disloyal? Or was it just casual, half-humorous nattering? Hastily Katharine put a humorous note into her voice, and kept it there, conscientiously, until the end of the recital. But still she felt unhappy, almost degraded. Oh, Stephen, why have I done this to you? Why have you made me do it to you? And with Mrs Forsyth looking on, too, with her mean, exultant eyes?

Her washing slumped to a stop in the machine, and
Katharine
hastily extracted it and trundled it across to the spin-drier. It was all right; of course it was. All wives talked about their husbands like this sometimes; it was just a safety-valve, a necessary letting off of steam. Healthy, that’s what Stella would call it, and why shouldn’t Stella be right sometimes, like anybody else? Just because her children were so annoyingly perfect, it didn’t mean that she was wrong about everything. The spin-drier began to throb reassuringly under Katharine’s hands, like a great cold kitten, and Katharine leaned on it, comforted, relishing its effortless energy as she herself enjoyed her last minutes of idleness.

A
S
K
ATHARINE CAME
up the steps after work that evening, she became aware of voices on the threshold of the house next door. Mrs Forsyth’s voice mainly, comforting some unseen sufferer in a voice shrill and purposeful as some predatory night bird.

“My dear, I
do
know how you feel,” she was saying—and now Katharine could see the thin, neat figure poised dimly in the Prescotts’ doorway. “Douglas is exactly the same. If
he
feels like going out in the evening, why, then out we have to go. It doesn’t occur to him to think that
I
might be tired, or busy, or not in the mood. The trouble with men is, they have so little to do that they’re really killing time for more than half their waking hours. Yes, it really
is
more than half. I’ve worked it out. A man in an ordinary, average job has seventy hours’ leisure a week, apart from sleeping! Seventy hours! Imagine it! I’d think the world was coming to an end if I had as much as seven!”

Katharine could not hear Mary’s softer response from indoors, but it went on for quite a long time, and it was tantalisingly just possible to hear the unmistakable cadences of self-pity at the end of every few sentences. A lovely,
anti-husband
natter was in progress, and Katharine felt herself drawn by the sound like an alcoholic by the clink of glasses.

The aggrieved pair did not seem to feel that Katharine was intruding. Indeed, from the moment when she settled herself leaning against the other damp pillar at the entrance of the Prescott home, she seemed to fit into the pattern of the conversation like a stopper into a bottle. It was a little
disconcerting
in a way: as if she had recently passed some test for total membership of an exclusive club: the club of the Unhappy
Wives. For a long time she had been as it were an associate member—her temporary differences with Stephen had been just sufficient qualification. Was she to be considered a life member now? Was that how they now regarded her?

“… so when he rang up and said he’d got tickets for the theatre tonight, and wanted me to meet him in town, I didn’t see how I could refuse. How
could
I?”

Mary’s wide, beautiful eyes stared out bewildered into the damp night. But Mrs Forsyth was once again ready with reassurance of her own inimitable brand.

“Of course you couldn’t! I know just how you felt. They know they’ve got you—like
that
—(she jabbed her thumb downwards, as if nailing the idea to its appropriate place) when they do something like that to settle an argument. They know there’s no answer to it.”

Mary looked uncertain.

“But he must be doing it to please me, after all, mustn’t he? That’s the awful part. I
ought
to be pleased. And of course I would be if only I didn’t know—I mean, if I didn’t feel—I mean perhaps all the time he’s thinking——”

She stopped. Only Katharine could appreciate the cause of her confusion. However, Mrs Forsyth
thought
she could, and that was quite sufficient to enable her to answer in
accordance
with the principles (few and simple) of the Unhappy Wives:

“Oh, that’s how they always try to work it,” she assured the wavering Mary. “When they know they’re in the wrong. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s when Douglas uses a bunch of flowers or a trip to the theatre as a last word in an argument. It
infuriates
me! If he knows he’s in the wrong I want him to admit it, not to silence me with sentimental gestures!”

Katharine was in the middle of wondering what kind of sentimental gesture would in fact succeed in silencing Mrs Forsyth, when Mary turned to her:

“Oh, Katharine, perhaps
you
can help me? I didn’t ask you before, because I seem to be
always
dumping Angela on you; but if you could possibly have her for this evening, then I
wouldn’t so much mind going out. That’s half what I’m worrying about, I think—leaving her alone.”

“Of course,” said Katharine warmly. “Tell her to come over as soon as she likes. We could put up the camp-bed in Jane’s room, and——”

She stopped. Only a few days ago Stephen had been urging her to discourage the friendship between Jane and Angela. True, he hadn’t said anything since, and Katharine was beginning to hope that he had forgotten all about it; but surely this would be the height of tactlessness—gratuitously to remind him of it by inviting Angela to stay the night with them? With practised skill, she proceeded to get herself out of it by sheer reckless improvisation. She was terribly sorry, but she had spoken without thinking; just tonight of all nights it would be impossible to have Angela, because Stephen might be bringing two old college friends back with him for the evening, and he might want to ask them to stay the night, which would mean using the sofa
and
the camp-bed.

The main thing about this sort of story was not so much that it should be credible as that it should be impervious to evidence of any kind, for or against. She had carefully only said that the friends
might
be coming, that they
might
be staying the night. By the time they hadn’t done either, the whole thing would be over and done with.

But all the same, Mary was looking so disappointed that Katharine impulsively added: “But if you like, I’ll keep an eye on Angela for you. I’ll pop in at intervals and see that she’s all right. Will that do? Stephen and his friends won’t mind my not being there all the time,” she added, rather
perfunctorily
. She realised, with a mixture of relief and chagrin, that no one but herself cared a hang whether her story held water or not. Consistency in lying is an essentially solitary craft, usually quite wasted on its audience.

Mary seemed to be weighing up Katharine’s offer.

“Ye-es,” she said, rather doubtfully—indeed grudingly, Katharine felt. “Yes—I suppose that would do. I mean, thank you very much, that would be marvellous,” she amended,
with unconvincing enthusiasm. “The only thing is,” she
continued
, with renewed hesitancy, “that—that Angela really seems nervous tonight. Nervous of being left alone, I mean. You see, she thinks …”

Her voice grew vague, lost in hesitations, and Mrs Forsyth eagerly broke in:

“Yes, did you know, Katharine, Mary’s just been telling me: Angela thinks she saw the dark man in the raincoat
again.
This evening! Hanging about outside the house, just like last time. Of course, as I tell Mary, it must be all her imagination mustn’t it? You were saying, weren’t you, that she’s very imaginative….” Her eyes held Katharine’s in a meaning glance which Mary was somehow supposed not to notice, though how she could fail to do so it was hard to see, since they were both standing right in front of her.

Katharine ignored the look, and spoke directly to Mary:

“Of course the child’s nervous, all alone,” she agreed briskly. “And I expect you’ll be out pretty late. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll collect up all my mending and bring it in, then I could stay the whole time.” She was about to invent hastily some further reason why Stephen’s friends could totally dispense with their hostess, but thought better of it; everyone but herself had forgotten about them so completely. Instead, she went on: “I certainly think you ought to take this chance, Mary, and go out and have some fun. It will do you a world of good—both of you.”

This time the meaning glance excluded Mrs Forsyth, and serve her right, thought Katharine cheerfully, as she hurried back to her own house and set about preparing supper.

This must be done even more hastily than usual is she was to be free in time to fulfil her promise to Mary: so she found it hard not to show her impatience when she turned round from tipping the potatoes into boiling water and found herself confronted by Clare’s face, at its very gloomiest, peering with maddening hesitancy round the kitchen door.

Gerunds? Compound Interest? The Anglicans and the Rump Parliament? How could
anyone
be expected to cope with
it while mincing Sunday’s joint with enough onions and
breadcrumbs
to make it stretch for five? But the poor child looked so woebegone, so sure that she was going to be snubbed.

“What is it, Clare? Do come right in, and don’t hang about in the door like that. The draught’ll put the oven out.”

Like a general deploying his troops to face a new threat, Katharine consciously rearranged her faculties so as to release a proportion of them from attention to the mince and the onions and the chopping of cabbage, and laid them at Clare’s disposal.

But it wasn’t homework, apparently. It was something much, much worse, to judge by the slow widening of Clare’s already horror-stricken eyes, and by the increasing confusion of her speech as she came, via innumerable detours and irrelevancies, to the crux of the disaster.

She had been invited to a party. It was out at last; and Clare gazed at her mother with despairing expectancy, as if awaiting a flood of commiseration.

“But that’s nice, darling,” said Katharine obtusely. “Your red dress will be back from the cleaners by then, and we’ll get you some new shoes, something pretty——”

“But, Mummy, I haven’t got to
go
, have I?” interrupted Clare, incredulously, as if she had not known before that such ruthlessness existed in the world. “You don’t mean that, do you? I’ve got to
go
?”

“But why not, darling?” asked Katharine helplessly, flinging into the pan an assortment of vegetables further to eke out the mince. “Why don’t you want to?”

“But it’s
Sandra’s
party!” explained Clare, with such an air of having clarified the whole problem that Katharine began to feel that she must be being unforgivably stupid. Fancy not understanding why it is utterly impossible to go to the party of someone called Sandra.

“You see, Mummy …”

The explanation that followed, comprising a minute-by-minute account of the complex and fluctuating exchanges of best friends that had been taking place since the beginning of
term, left her little the wiser. She could only take Clare’s word for it that going to the party would be “
Awful.
Mummy. I
couldn’t
!”

Clare paused, twirling the handle of the mincer. “And anyway, Sandra doesn’t want me.”

“Then why has she asked you?” asked Katharine reasonably—or so she naïvely supposed.

“Oh,
Mummy
!” Clare stared at her parent forlornly. Language contained no words in which to explain anything so obvious as why someone called Sandra should invite you to a party when she didn’t want you and you didn’t want to go.

“Well, tell her you can’t go,” suggested Katharine,
abandoning
the impenetrable maze into which the contemplation of acceptance was leading them. “Tell Sandra—nicely, of course—that you have a previous engagement.”

“But
Mummy,
I’ve already
accepted
!” waited Clare; and then, in touching, total surrender, she flung the whole matter into Katharine’s lap. “Mummy, will you ring up Sandra’s mother and say I can’t go?
Please
!”

“But what shall I say?
Why
shall I say you can’t? I mean, if you’ve already told Sandra that you can?”

“Oh,
anything
.”
The situation was plainly desperate. “Say you don’t let me go out so late. Say you’re ill and I’ve got to stay at home to look after you. Say
anything,
except don’t say I’m going out somewhere else, because they know I’m not. Oh,
please,
Mummy! You must! Oh, it’ll be so
awful
!”

Wondering how many other mothers gain their reputation for possessiveness and over-protectiveness in this sort of way, Katharine gave a half-hearted promise to ring up the unknown Mrs Sandra and say something appropriate. And by now it was time to put the meal on the table; to summon the rest of the family; to serve out helpings which unobtrusively avoided giving onions to Jane, cabbage to Flora, or anything at all to Clare, who was still brooding over her only partially averted doom. The conversation also had to be steered away from channels which could lead to such subjects as Curfew, or parties, or homework, or why Clare wasn’t eating anything,
or to anything at all which Flora would be likely to contradict in that know-all manner which always infuriated Stephen. And on top of all this, Katharine had to tell Stephen that she would be spending the evening next-door looking after Angela; tell him, too, in such a way that he didn’t really quite take it in—not enough to protest then and there, anyway.

And so, what with one thing and another, by the time Katharine was staggering down the front steps with her gigantic pile of mending, she felt exactly as if she was setting off on holiday.

M
ARY’S WHITE, ANXIOUS
face broke into an astonished laugh as she opened the door to Katharine.

“My goodness, you look like a refugee!” she exclaimed. “As if you were escaping with all your bedding, or something.”

“I
am
escaping,” replied Katharine, laughing, as she
staggered
after Mary into the sitting-room. “It’s always an escape, don’t you think, to get away from your family for a bit?”

But of course Mary was the wrong person for a joke like this just now; the laughter had already left her face. How careful you had to be when someone was in real trouble. Trying to mend matters, Katharine hastened on: “But don’t be frightened. I’m not moving in. This really
is
my mending.” She dumped her load on to the floor beside the sofa, and stared at it a little unbelievingly herself as it swelled and spread in the manner of miscellaneous objects once they find themselves on a floor. “You’d think it was enough to last me a year, wouldn’t you?” she admitted. “But actually I shall be able to finish it all this evening. My mending is always like this. Isn’t yours? You know mountains of gigantic garments each needing one tiny thing done to them.”

Katharine bent over her pile, and began fingering it through distastefully, like a reluctant buyer at a jumble sale.

“Just look—this is the sort of thing, I mean. A winter coat with the sleeve lining torn. Another with the tab off. Jane’s satchel with the strap broken. Flora’s jeans wanting a new zip. The loose cover of the armchair with half its tapes off. I do envy those women in books whose mending always seems to consist just of darning socks, don’t you? Why, they can keep it in a mending basket! I’d need a van to keep mine in. Of course, our whole house is a sort of glorified mending-basket-cum-washing-box
when you come to think of it….”

Katharine had been chattering on, hoping to bring the smile back to her friend’s face. But Mary seemed not even to be listening. She was fidgeting about the room, restlessly, in a semblance of tidying, and now she had moved over to the window, latching it, testing the firmness of the latch, and then just standing there, staring out into the darkness. The long, heavy curtain had fallen back over her slight figure, and all Katharine could see of her was a beautifully shod foot, tapping uneasily. The curtain twitched a little as Mary’s shoulders moved behind it—perhaps in a shrug, perhaps in some less definable restlessness.

Mary remained behind the curtain so long that Katharine grew puzzled. She went over to join her.

“What are you looking at?” she asked casually, pulling the curtain a little to one side. She was quite unprepared for the startled terror with which Mary whirled round to face her.

“
Oh!
How you startled me!” cried Mary—unreasonably, it seemed to Katharine, for surely she must have remembered that Katharine was in the room? “Oh—you gave me such a fright!”

“Who on earth did you think I was?” laughed Katharine. “And what
are
you looking at, anyway? Are the neighbours dancing naked in the garden, or something?”

Standing beside Mary, cut off by the curtains from the lighted room behind them, she, too, stared out at the dark gardens—Mary’s, her own, and then the Pococks’, with its eternal line of washing, forever renewed and yet for ever the same, like the tissues of the body. A little while back someone had tried to get Katharine to sign a petition about getting the Pococks to take their washing in on Sundays, but Katharine had refused. She felt that by now it would be like asking them to take in their lawn, or their toolshed, or any other permanent feature of their garden. Anyway, once neighbours got into the habit of signing petitions there was no knowing where it would stop. Before you knew where you were there would be
petitions about people keeping rabbits in ramshackle hutches in the back garden, or letting their children practise the piano at all hours of the week-end.

Anyway, the Pococks’ washing looked very nearly beautiful just now as it billowed white and ghostlike in the gusty November darkness; and beyond it the houses and the small bare trees faded into a medley of dark and darker angles and smudges.

She could see nothing that could have riveted Mary’s attention for all this time; and indeed Mary herself confirmed this.

“I’m not looking at anything,” she declared, a little sulkily, and swished back through the curtains into the lighted room. “I’ve got to go now,” she went on, suddenly quite bright and practical. “Will you be all right, Katharine? Angela’s upstairs, finishing her homework, and then she’ll go straight to bed. You needn’t bother about her at all, so long as you’ll just
be
here. And help yourself to anything you like to eat or drink, of course, won’t you? There isn’t anything much, actually, I somehow couldn’t get around to doing any
shopping
today….” She moved hesitantly towards the door, and stopped again.

“I
must
go,” she repeated, as if somehow Katharine was detaining her; and then: “I must just go and make sure I’ve bolted the back door.”

Katharine followed her through the kitchen and into the scullery, and it turned out that she
had
bolted the back door. And locked it, too, and put up the chain. But Mary examined her handiwork a little sceptically, pressed the bolt home more securely, and then latched the tiny window that looked out on to the dustbins. Then she stood staring at the refrigerator as if she wanted to lock that too; as if she suspected that it concealed a trap-door to a secret passage under the road.

“I think there are some cold sausages left,” was the
conclusion
of her anxious scrutiny; and Katharine laughed, and hastened to assure her that she had already had a meal.

But Mary still hung about in the scullery, intent and very
still, as if waiting for something. Under the glare of the white, unshaded bulb she looked strained and almost ill, despite her sparkling eardrops and the sequin-spangled black jersey she was wearing.

The refrigerator jerked into its periodic bout of humming, and this seemed to rouse Mary. She moved back into the hall.

“Well, goodbye, Katharine,” she said, in her normal voice. “And thank you most awfully. We’ll try not to be late.” And then, silencing Katharine’s assurances that she didn’t mind how late they were, she added: “Bolt the front door after I’m outside, won’t you, Katharine? And don’t let anyone in. Just take no notice if anyone knocks.”

Katharine was startled.

“Why ever not?” she asked. “I’m not Angela, you know—I’m not a child!”

“No. But you’re alone in the house
with
a child,” said Mary. “And you heard—didn’t you?—that Angela saw a man with a raincoat hanging around the house this evening?”

“Yes—but for Heaven’s sake—— After all,
we
both know——”

“Hush!”

Mary’s voice was not merely peremptory; it had a wild despairing quality, as if it had been forced out from some baffling depth of agony. “Hush, Katharine,
please
!”

Katharine realised, with some confusion, that she must have been talking rather loud, and she glanced up the stairs, expecting to see Angela leaning zestfully over the banisters, as Flora would undoubtedly have been doing in a similar situation. But there was no sign of her; and anyway, Katharine hadn’t said anything incriminating, had she? She hadn’t even been going to finish the sentence which Mary had interrupted with such unnecessary urgency.

And now Mary had gone, tap-tapping off into the darkness to meet the husband she was afraid of. Or hated? Or was trying to get on better with? Katharine shrugged off the problem, closed the door and bolted it, according to her instructions, and went back to the living-room.

For a few minutes she sat idly on the sofa, looking through a magazine. There was more than enough time for the mending in the four hours or so before the Prescotts could be back, and it was so restful to sit in someone else’s house doing absolutely nothing. You could never do this at home; there was always something, somewhere, nagging at your conscience,—usually in full view, too, no matter where you sat. Curtains that needed washing if you faced the window; a grate that needed black-leading if you faced the fire: books that needed sorting and dusting if you faced the wall: the threadbare piece of carpet that needed patching if you faced the door. But here nothing mattered at all. Indeed, the blemishes in someone else’s home can be a positive delight to a jaded housewife’s eye. The black smudge on the wallpaper that
you
don’t have to rub at with breadcrumbs; the vase of wilting flowers that
you
don’t have to give fresh water to; the dust in the carved table legs that
you
don’t have to poke at with a duster wrapped round a stick. Bliss! thought Katharine, looking ecstatically round at each of these flaws in turn: such peace and quiet as she had not experienced for months! And it was only after several minutes of revelling in it that Katharine began to feel that the quietness was too complete.

What was Angela doing? Homework, Mary had said; but surely homework wasn’t done in such total silence as this? Most certainly it wasn’t in Katharine’s own home. True, with an only child one wouldn’t expect arguments about ink, and taking too much room at the table, and who had borrowed whose protractor; but all the same, there should be
some
sound from upstairs, surely? The shutting of a book—the dropping of a pencil. Or had Angela already gone to bed?

Reclining at ease on the sofa, Katharine worried about it a little, but not enough to make her shatter this enchanted idleness by actually getting off the sofa and going to look. Give it another ten minutes, she thought drowsily. If by then there had been absolutely no sound….

*

Katharine woke with a start, and with the feeling that she
had been asleep for a very long time. She started up, and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece.

A quarter past three! Had she been drugged, or something? And why weren’t Mary and Alan home long ago? But almost coincidently with the dismay of this discovery, Katharine recovered full consciousness and remembered about the clock—Mary’s idiotic clock which always said a quarter past three. They couldn’t get a new one, Mary had once explained, because she particularly wanted a chiming clock that would ring out delightfully every quarter of an hour, and Alan particularly wanted an electric clock that wouldn’t. So they had compromised by not having a clock at all. Sad, Katharine remembered reflecting at the time, that so many compromises in marriage are of this empty and destructive kind.

So whatever the time was, it wasn’t a quarter past three. It must be late, all the same; it
felt
late, somehow. Half past eleven, perhaps? Even twelve? Mary and Alan would be back any moment now, and Katharine was guiltily aware that she hadn’t looked after Angela in the least. She hadn’t even
seen
the child. And what about that strange silence at the beginning of the evening—almost as if Angela hadn’t been in the house at all?

In sudden panic, Katharine scrambled off the sofa and hurried out of the room. Of course, when she got upstairs she would find Angela in bed and asleep; but all the same she must reassure herself about it. How absurd to have let her half-waking imagination run riot about a dark man in a raincoat kidnapping the child, when the dark man in the raincoat didn’t even exist! How suggestible could one get?

Angela’s bed was empty. But somehow the shock of this discovery was less than the shock of finding, a fraction of a second later, that the reason for its emptiness was simply that Angela was still up. Up and dressed—or partially dressed—in a shapely bathing suit of Mary’s surmounted by a glamorous gold lamé stole. Thus accoutred, she was posing on tiptoe in front of the long mirror in her mother’s bedroom, her white, bony little legs mottled with cold, and her arms outstretched,
the wide, glittering stole draped insecurely over them so that they looked like great floppy, pleading wings.

Her back was to the door, so Katharine was able to watch her for a moment unnoticed, amusement swiftly obliterating her terror. But all the same, it was much too late for playing about like this.

“Angela,” she called, and the little girl whirled round, her draperies whirling with her. Whether all that graceful amazement was real or feigned it was impossible to say. “Angela, it’s much too late for all this. Why aren’t you in bed?”

The outspread gold wings buckled and drooped. Angela’s whole body abandoned its pose of floating grandeur, and took on a posture appropriate for dealing with something that simply wasn’t
fair.

“But it’s not my bedtime yet,” she protested, aggrieved. “It’s only twenty past eight.”

At first Katharine did not believe her, so strong was her sensation of having slept for a long, long time; and even when a glance at the little bedside clock had confirmed Angela’s statement, she still felt somehow dismayed—at a loss,
uprooted.
To find that her long, deep sleep had lasted less than a quarter of an hour, and that the whole evening was, after all, still in front of her, was an extraordinary sensation—as if she had actually travelled in time, forward to midnight and then back again.

“Look how well I can do a Soutenu Turn”, Angela was saying, twirling with lightness, precision, and very nearly grace in front of the mirror. “Auntie Pen says I’m good. She says that if I was
her
child she’d let me have ballet lessons.”

“And won’t your parents let you?” asked Katharine, surprised: for whatever Mary and Alan might be failing to give their adopted daughter, they had never seemed to grudge her any material advantages.

“Oh, they don’t not
let
me,” explained Angela. “It’s just that they don’t … they aren’t …” Vocabulary failed her when it came to trying to express in words the narrowing
whirlpool of self-absorption into which she sensed that her parents were being sucked, leaving them with no energy to spare for her and her needs.

“It’s not that they
won’t
do it,” was the nearest she could get. “It’s just that they won’t
do
it.” And then, reverting to the other theme: “I wish I
was
Auntie Pen’s child.”