The Trouble-Makers (9 page)

“Yes—it’s all rather a shock for her, of course,” replied Katharine, equally cautiously. Unless one of them definitely broke faith with Mary, this could go on for ever. Probably Auntie Pen had been told, thought Katharine crossly, annoyed
with herself for having felt flattered at having been specially chosen as confidante from among all Mary’s friends. Yes, of course Auntie Pen would have been told: and Mrs Forsyth as well, very likely; and Mary’s daily woman…. Oh, well if Mary wanted to
look
for trouble …

“The police were there this morning!” Stella was chattering on, in less and less of an undertone as the interest of her revelations mounted “And it seemed to upset Mary terribly—I can’t think why. They’d only come to get a description from Alan of what this burglar person looked like, and Mary was really quite rude to them. Almost as if she didn’t
want
them to find out who he was. It does make you think, doesn’t it, about what we were saying the other day? I mean this idea that perhaps it was a boy-friend, quarrelling with Alan over Mary….”

So Stella didn’t know the truth after all. Katharine felt her vanity restored, and she was also relieved on Mary’s account. Better, surely, that Mary should be the victim merely of these idle and quite unfounded speculations than that people should begin to suspect the truth.

For Mary was no actress. Her odd and evasive behaviour over the whole business could not fail to rouse suspicions of one sort or another, and suspicions that are unfounded surely cannot do a fraction of the damage of suspicions based on fact.

“I must go and see her,” murmured Katharine,
non-committally
. “But I can’t quite think when—I’m always terribly busy on Saturdays——”

“Oh, she’ll be all right
today
,”
Stella assured her. “
I
shall be there this afternoon, and I’ll stay as long as she likes. I wouldn’t let her down at a time like this.”

I’m sure you wouldn’t, thought Katharine wryly; and nor would any other of Mary’s friends. While there was one single crumb of further gossip to be extracted from Mary’s cringing and evasive lips, so long would her friends rally round, sympathising, questioning, probing….

Including Katharine herself, of course. Ah, but that was different!
She
was trying to
help
Mary. Perhaps that’s what
all the others felt they were doing, too? Perhaps, indeed, that was what they
were
doing. For gossip, be it never so unkind, does at least serve to give one’s troubles a social framework. It embraces them, takes them to itself, and returns them perhaps a little unrecognisable, but nevertheless cared for, labelled—given some sort of positive status in the drama of the neighbourhood. And might not this be a sustaining sort of thing—a strength and a support whose value is only appreciated if it is at some time withdrawn?

Katharine picked up the two books on which she would be paying 8d. fines around the beginning of December, dragged Jane out of her study of the boyhood of Savonarola—this had followed straight on, without pause or change of expression, from her investigation of the habits of the
Australian
Brown-footed Rat—and they set off home.

It had been a busy morning, and it was natural enough that among all her other preoccupations Katharine had given little thought to last night’s disturbance. Certainly she had done nothing about implementing her midnight intention of examining the dustbin by daylight; and by now, of course, the dustmen had come and gone.

Jane chanted the words softly as she sat cross-legged on the hearthrug, while Curfew crouched insecurely on her
inadequate
lap, staring with stupid, lustrous eyes into the flickering firelight. His fast-withering presents, mixed with wet tissue paper, lay neglected on the rug; but Jane didn’t seem to mind. He had
had
them—that was the main thing. What “having” them in this context could possibly mean, Katharine herself could not understand, but she knew that to a nine-year-old brain it was plain as plain.

Nearly every member of the family had contributed to the festival; even Flora had condescendingly wrapped a slice of cucumber in a corner of blue laundry paper, and stuck it down with Selotape. And as for Clare, she had gone to a lot of trouble to carve a carrot into the shape of a doll, had wrapped it carefully first in silver paper and then in coloured crepe paper, and had adorned it with a huge postcard-size label saying: “To Dearest Curfew, With Much Love from Clare.” in eight different colours. Sometimes Katharine was touched almost to tears by Clare’s affection for her youngest sister, her readiness to enter into her childish interests. At others, she wondered if it was perhaps an expression of Clare’s longing for her own lost childhood; for the days before gerunds, and stockings, and brassières, and failing to get into the Middle School hockey team. Was it something to worry about rather than to delight in? No, of course it wasn’t … and now Clare was accompanying Jane’s song on the piano, improvising
charmingly in the bass: and with sudden, furious longing, Katharine wished that she wished Stephen was there. She didn’t wish it, of course; in fact, at this very moment, she was listening nervously for the sound of his key in the lock—but if only she
could
wish it! If only he was the sort of father who would join joyfully in this sort of ridiculous scene—who would sit there with Jane in the firelight, teasing her, talking
nonsense
to Curfew, examining his presents with laughing
admiration
. Or—this occurred to Katharine for the very first time—if only she was the sort of wife who could have turned him into a father like that. Could it be
she
who had turned him, instead, into the sort of father who would scowl round the room, maddened by the disorderliness of it all, the idiocy, and the crowning impropriety of bringing a rabbit indoors when it ought to be kept outside in a hutch, if kept it must be?

Heavens! There he was! As Katharine listened to the brisk, firm footsteps coming up to the front door, she was conscious of a physical shrinking behind her ribs. Now this lovely evening would be spoiled, if not by him (for after all he did sometimes restrain his irritation on such occasions), then by her own fear of his irritation—her tenseness—the bright, uneasy way she would speak to him as he came in.

Scrambling over the muddle of greenery in her path, she hurried out into the hall to greet—or did she mean intercept?—her husband. But the footsteps outside were not followed by the expected sound of his key in the lock. Instead, there was a knock, and a ring, and another knock; and who could be thus urgently demanding admittance but Stella?

“Oh—hullo,” said Katharine with mixed relief and annoyance; for Stella wasn’t an ideal guest at a rabbit’s birthday party either. Katharine felt almost sure that Jack and Mavis didn’t indulge in anything half so babyish, and it would turn out to be all something to do with going to grammar schools.

So she kept Stella standing, rather inhospitably, in the hall and listened to her message, which came, as Katharine had half expected, from next door.

“Mary says will you go in there for a few minutes, if you possibly can? She seems scared of being alone, poor thing,” explained Stella condescendingly. “And the others seem to be out. I’ve told her I can’t stay any longer … and actually, I don’t understand why she’s so frightened, do you? Do you think she can possibly be thinking that—whoever it was—might be coming back? I wonder if she——?”

Stella had lowered her voice a little for the last few sentences, but evidently not enough, for here was Flora, rigid with interest, hovering halfway out of the sitting-room door. If only they’d learn to eavesdrop a little less obviously, reflected Katharine, they’d get away with it a great deal more often, and learn all sorts of exciting things.

“Run away, Flora,” she ordered ineffectually. “And shut the door.” Flora, of course, did neither. It would have been necessary either to say it much more sharply or else at least twice if it was to have any effect, and Katharine did not want to do either under Stella’s assessing gaze. That was the trouble with Stella: whenever she was present, things which had merely been a nuisance before suddenly became a
Parent-Child
Relationship.

“All right. Tell her I’ll come quite soon,” she said to Stella, as unilluminatingly as she could for the benefit of the attentive Flora. “Tell her I’ll try not to be long….” Hang it all, why should she be apologetic about it! What right had Mary to expect them all to dance attendance on her like this? Anyone would think
she
was the invalid, not Alan. No one seemed to be visiting
him,
or talking about him, or worrying about how he was. Did he mind? Or didn’t he notice? Or would he have hated it if people had made a fuss of him? Probably he would; whereas Mary loved it. So it seemed to be all for the best, really, as injustice so often does.

The Prescotts’ house was, as usual, bitterly cold. The sitting-room had plainly not been used all day, and Mary lit the gas-fire now for the first time as she brought Katharine in. Katharine sat down in the chair nearest the fire, and leaned towards the chilly blue flame, which as yet made no impact on
the big, unwelcoming room. Why had Mary brought her in here, in this formal sort of way, like a visitor, instead of just calling her into the kitchen for the usual gossip over the ironing or the washing-up?

The feeling of constraint increased as Mary seated herself in the chair opposite, with neither knitting nor sewing to soften the growing need for one of them to think of something to say. Desperately, Katharine searched for a subject that would not be so close to Mary’s anxieties as to seem inquisitive, and yet not so far away as to make it impossible for Mary to renew her confidences if she wished to.

“So you had Stella for the afternoon?” Katharine took the plunge. “How’s she getting along?”

“She seems all right,” said Mary unhelpfully: and then, suddenly, she came angrily alive:

“She’s been going on and on at me about dark husbands with raincoats! Nobody in the whole neighbourhood seems to have married a fair man, except Stella herself, of course—she
would
be different! She seems to think that I’m playing
Femme
Fatale
to the lot of them, and that they’ve been
fighting
Alan over me!
Me
!” Mary gave a short, bitter laugh. “A few years ago I dare say I’d have been able to break up one or two happy homes, but not now. Not after ten years married to Alan.”

The sheer misery in Mary’s voice frightened Katharine. She struggled to keep the conversation on a reassuring, gossippy level.

“Do you mean Stella actually
told
you she thought that?” she asked, ready to be slightly scandalised at such brash tactlessness.

“Oh no. Not point blank,” answered Mary quickly. “Haven’t you noticed about Stella, that with all her theories about being absolutely frank, and the healthiness of having a good row, and all the rest of it, she’s just as cunning as anybody else really. No. She started off by saying had the police got any detailed description out of Alan this morning? And when I told her no, he’d just said it was a dark man in a
raincoat, and he hadn’t had time to notice anything else, then she began about how impossibly vague a description it was—how it would include practically all the men we know. Fair enough; but then she began
listing
all the men we know—sort of laughing, you know, just to show that she only meant it to illustrate how useless any speculating would be—but actually she was watching me carefully after each name, to see if I blushed. I did too—several times—so I hope she’s satisfied! I blush very easily, you know, and I was getting so fed-up with it. So
fed-up
!
All these men in raincoats being lined up in front of me like an identity parade—she made me feel as if they were filing through the room then and there! She made me actually
see
them—she really did, Katharine! I could have screamed! At least, if it was possible to scream in this house…. In a house where Alan lives….” Her voice dropped again into the soft bitterness of a few minutes ago. Again Katharine was frightened.

“Scream? Of course you should scream! The very next time Alan annoys you! It would do you both a world of good,” she declared bracingly—and cowered before the pitying glance from Mary’s unhappy eyes.

“You sound just like Stella,” she commented wearily. “Both of you, standing safely outside the lion’s cage, and urging the person inside to poke the lion with a stick. That’s what half of psychology consists of, it seems to me,” she went on accusingly, and a little wildly. “Theories about how other people should poke lions with sticks….” She ran her hand through her untidy hair despairingly; then looked up at Katharine and spoke quite fiercely:

“All right. So the next time Alan says one of those awful quiet, sarcastic things to me, then I scream. Right? So I scream. What happens next?”

She looked at Katharine as if in genuine expectation of an answer; and of course Katharine could not give one. She could not imagine at all what would happen next. One simply could not conceive of someone screaming at Alan. It wasn’t in keeping with his character. A man’s character, she reflected
with surprise, consists a good deal more of the way people feel and behave towards him than of the way he himself feels and behaves.

“I don’t know,” she said feebly; and a look of unhappy triumph flickered for a moment across Mary’s face.

“I want to show you something, Katharine,” she said, after a moment’s thought. “I’ve sometimes wondered whether to show it to you before, but—well, I don’t know…. Wait there. I have to fetch it….”

Awkward, stumbling over the rug as she went, Mary got herself out of the room, and a moment later Katharine heard her moving about in Alan’s study.

Left alone, Katharine sat very still, staring into the steady spears of whitish flame that murmured in the bleak grate before her. She felt herself tensed up, expectant—but it was not quite the pleasurable curiosity she would have expected to feel in such a situation. She was aware of a curious sense of misgiving—a growing certainty that whatever it was that Mary was about to show her, she would rather not see it.

It was an envelope that Mary handed to her—a plain white envelope, with nothing written on it but a date—the tenth of August, Katharine, noticed, six years ago. She fingered the envelope rather helplessly, wondering what she was supposed to do. It was a little lumpy—uneven. Something other than a sheet of paper was inside it. Again she felt that inexplicable stirring of repugnance; but it was impossible, of course, at this stage, to withdraw from Mary’s confidence.

“Open it,” said Mary impatiently. “Open it and look
inside
. It’s not stuck down.”

Katharine obeyed, and found herself staring, bewildered, at a tuft of greyish-dark hair, lifeless, and very dry.

She looked up at Mary in bewilderment.

“What …? I mean, where …?” she began confusedly; and Mary gave her a twisted smile.

“It’s Alan’s of course,” she answered, in tones matter-
of-fact
and yet somehow sounding strained to near
breaking-point
. “Alan’s very own hair. And where did I get it? I
pulled it out, with my very own hands. Let me tell you about it, Katharine. Let me tell you about the time when I still dared scream at Alan….

“It must have been six or seven years ago now, I suppose; and Alan and I were having one of our fearful rows—and at the height of it I got so furious that I not only screamed at him, but I grabbed him by the hair and pulled for all I was worth! Quite a handful must have come out, I suppose—I didn’t notice, of course, at the time, I was in an absolute rage—and naturally I never thought about it again after the row was over. I mean, I thought about having
hurt
him, of course, and I was very sorry, and I apologised, but I mean I never thought about the actual bit of hair that had come out. I mean, who would? Honestly, Katharine, who
would
?”

“No, naturally not,” said Katharine, mystified. “So how…?”

“I’m just telling you. We made it up in the end, as I was saying, and he accepted my apology quite amiably at the time—or seemed to. And really, you know, he wasn’t
so
badly hurt—only just for the minute. So of course I never thought about it again. Not for months. For years. Not until last winter, when I was looking through his desk for a bill he said I’d forgotten to give him, and I was sure I hadn’t, so I thought I’d have a good look while he wasn’t there. Well, so there I was, scrabbling through all the drawers in his desk, and right at the back of one of them I found—
it
!”

She snatched the envelope back from Katharine, and stood staring down at it as if in a trance. Fear, like an infectious illness, seemed to creep from her across the room, towards Katharine.

“You see what it means?” continued Mary. “After the row was all forgiven and done with—or so I thought—he must have gone quietly back to the room where we were … and collected up the bits of hair … all by himself … and put them carefully in an envelope to
keep
!
And with the date written on it—the date of the quarrel—written in cold blood, to remind him for ever…. Do you see, Katharine? Do you
see
…?”

Her voice grew shrill as she thrust the envelope once again under Katharine’s eyes, stabbing with her forefinger at the brief figures. Before Katharine could think of anything
soothing
to say, Mary was continuing: “All these years he’s kept it—without saying anything—hoarding it up against me. He means to use it somehow—some time. How can I know? It seems nearly mad to me, doesn’t it to you, Katharine? Nearly mad. So
now
do you see why I wouldn’t scream next time he’s angry with me? In ten years time I’d find that scream, in his desk … bottled somehow … in pickle….”