The Trouble-Makers (10 page)

Mary’s wild words dissolved now in floods of uncontrollable crying. Katharine tried to comfort her—to suggest soothing explanations—to assure her that she was making too much of it: but Mary’s tears continued for a long, long time. And afterwards, Katharine could scarcely recall whether it was Mary’s smothered voice or her own uneasy thoughts which had said to her, at some stage in the evening: And now here is Alan saying nothing about the stabbing … just as for six long years he has said nothing about the hair. What does it mean? What is he storing it up for? What will he use it for—and when?

F
OR THE NEXT
few days Katharine did not see much of the Prescotts, and what little she did see was reassuring. She had even seen them, all three together, setting off on Sunday afternoon for some expedition or other, like any other family party. True, Alan’s arm was still in a sling, but he did not look ill, or particularly depressed; and Mary’s head was bent, looking down at the ground, but then she always walked like that, and with those three-inch heels she probably had to look where she was treading, too. Angela, it must be admitted, looked bored—as if she had been told she would enjoy it when she got there—and who knows, perhaps she would.

Anyway, it seemed as if life next-door was back to normal; and it was not until the following Wednesday—the night of the firework party—that anything occurred to shake Katharine’s easy assumption that the whole business had blown over.

Katharine managed to leave work a few minutes early that evening, hoping to avoid the worst of the rush hour; but alas, the queues seemed to be as long as ever. Perhaps everyone was trying to do the same as she was—get home early to scrub potatoes, prick sausages and slit chestnuts ready for cooking on the bonfire. A few for cooking on the bonfire, that is to say; the rest were destined to be actually eaten, and must be
properly
cooked indoors. As she stood in the familiar queue, Katharine ran over in her mind her share of the preparations. Mary, thank goodness, was doing the hot drinks and the
toffee-apples;
the children would already be combing the house and garden for burnable rubbish—would Jane, this year, allow the old rocking horse stand to count as burnable rubbish? That was the difficulty about rubbish, that there wasn’t really any such thing. That is to say, there was always someone who loved
it, someone who thought that it would come in for something….

Gradually Katharine became aware of an uneasy, somehow familiar sensation, but so preoccupied was she with her thoughts that it was several seconds before she recognised it for what it was. It was the sensation of being watched. Swiftly she looked up, and met once more a pair of dark, censorious eyes staring straight into hers.

Auntie Pen again. In some confusion, Katharine collected her thoughts, smiled, and dropped back a couple of paces in the queue to join her. Auntie Pen was smiling now, the censoriousness gone, and, half laughing, she called Katharine’s attention to a dark, untidy bundle under her arm.

“My old garden coat,” she explained ruefully. “Destined for Angela’s guy. I don’t know why I submit to it, I’m sure. It only leaves me my best one to wear. To tell the truth, I’d really rather have given the guy my best one and kept the other. An old coat is so useful, isn’t it, and so irreplaceable? It takes years and years to get another old coat, whereas a new one can be bought in five minutes. Oh, well. I suppose the guy’s need is greater than mine,” she concluded cheerfully.

“That guy of Angela’s must be quite the dandy,” laughed Katharine. “He’s building up quite a wardrobe. He’s already got my husband’s old raincoat. Do you think he has to change for dinner, or something?”

Mrs Quentin turned, and looked at Katharine a little oddly.

“Your husband’s old
raincoat
?”
she asked, frowning. “Oh. Then that explains—that is—I wonder——?”

Katharine glanced at her companion enquiringly. The lined, strong face was no longer humorous. It looked calculating, almost defensive, in the sick light. Then Mrs Quentin laughed, not quite convincingly.

“Poor Mary! She’s such a child, isn’t she? And of course, I let myself in for it, really—simply stuck my neck out. I rang up yesterday, you see, to ask them if they wanted me to bring anything. I have a lot of old hats, you know, and of course you can’t give that sort of thing to your charwoman any more—even
the rag-man won’t take them. There aren’t the poor any more, you see. That’s the trouble with progress—it has abolished the poor without providing any substitute. Substitutes for coal, yes: and for tablecloths, and for soap, and for real pork sausages: but no substitute for the poor. Well, anyway, I thought it might amuse Angela to choose one of these hats for the guy, but she said no: the guy was already finished, and had all the clothes he needed. And just then there was a sort of clamour down the phone—a crashing and a clattering, though I expect it was just the receiver getting a little knock—you know how these sounds get magnified—and then there was Mary’s voice, asking me to bring an old coat for the guy, the one he had wasn’t suitable.
Suitable
!—I ask you—for a guy! I must say I was puzzled at the time. I’m afraid it made me laugh.”

“I’m still puzzled now,” put in Katharine “I wonder what was wrong with the coat I gave her? It——”

“Oh, my dear, don’t you see? Or perhaps you don’t know Mary as well as I do. She can be very childish in her outlook sometimes, and it’s my belief that she feels superstitious—sort of scared—about burning a figure in a raincoat after—what happened last week. Don’t you understand?”

In a way, Katharine understood. But it seemed a bit silly. After all, it wasn’t even as if there
had
been a man with a raincoat. Still, Mrs Quentin wasn’t to know that. Naturally, she had been told, and had believed, the same story as everyone else.

Or had she believed it? The older woman was looking at Katharine rather strangely now…. Not quite suspiciously, but—carefully … as if studying her reactions to this slightly far-fetched interpretation of Mary’s behaviour. Katharine thought quickly, and decided to brandish unshakeable belief in the Man with the Raincoat.

“Yes, of course. It must have been such a shock for her,” she lied placatingly. “I mean, to feel that a stranger can come into the house and attack someone like that …”

Had she sounded convincing? And convinced? Or had all
this headlong guilelessness been a bit overdone? For Mrs Quentin was still looking at her in that speculative way.

“
You
didn’t see anything of this man, did you?” she asked suddenly. “I mean, living next door, you might have noticed someone going in … or coming out … or hanging about in some way?”

Was it Katharine’s fancy that the question was less a question than a veiled piece of prompting? Was Mrs Quentin hinting that it would have been a most convenient, a most neighbourly piece of observation on Katharine’s part to have seen a suspicious figure, and thus have backed up the Prescotts’ story? And were her next words the truth, or were they merely intended to make up for Katharine’s unneighbourly ommission?

“Well,
I
saw him,” she declared, almost condescendingly, as one who knows the right thing to do even if the younger generation doesn’t. “As I came out of the house, after doing Angela’s tea, I saw a man of middle size, with the collar of his raincoat pulled up, hanging about under the lamp-post. Of course, I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but, looking back, I feel sure it must have been the same man.”

“But surely that would have been much earlier?” began Katharine—and stopped. Why should she call the old woman’s well-meant bluff? It must be that Auntie Pen knew—or guessed—what had really happend, and for the sake of her young sister-in-law was trying to bolster up the official story with this clumsy but well-intentioned fabrication. It would be cruel to point out inconsistencies—and pointless, too, for Katharine was quite as determined as Auntie Pen could be to protect Mary’s secret. And anyway, here was the bus, goading the flaccid queue into frenzied life; pushing, struggling, crushing out all possibility of further communication.

*

The firework party had gone well, without a single disaster of any kind. No one had burnt their fingers, or got anything in their eye, or had been grossly unfairly treated in the matter of being allowed to light things. None of the food had got burnt—except the things cooked on the bonfire, of course, but
that was different. Even the customary floods of tears at the poor guy being burnt passed off quite lightly, because this year, with Jack and Mavis away at boarding school, Stella wasn’t there to say that all this tender-hearted crying about the guy was really a sign of repressed sadism.

And above all, the fathers had been wonderful. Watching Alan, competent and almost gay as he set up rockets with his one good arm, Katharine caught herself wondering whether Mary didn’t, after all, invent or imagine half her troubles. But then, anyone watching Stephen would have thought the same of Katharine. How bronzed and handsome he had looked in the bonfire light. He seemed to have forgotten all about his strictures about Jane’s friendship with the Prescotts. Absorbed, happy, and efficient, he had explained to his
daughters
exactly how they should light this or that firework—how they should hold it—where they should stand. And the children, in their hearts a little frightened of the fireworks, had done exactly what he said: had treated his superior skill with the admiring deference for which in ordinary life he longed in vain. This was the sort of setting in which fathers could thrive, Katharine suddenly realised; a setting which really
is
a little dangerous, a little beyond the skill of the women-folk. Once upon a time nature provided just such a setting for every father everywhere, but this is something that civilisation has
systematically
destroyed, reducing every daily activity to something well within the powers of a woman, or even of a child.

And now the fireworks were over, and everyone had gone surging indoors into the Prescotts’ kitchen, to drink cocoa and hot punch. Only Katharine lingered for a few moments outside, to savour the quietness of the November night. Well, partly to savour the quietness, and partly to avoid the argument about how much, if any, of the punch Flora should be allowed to drink. If she simply wasn’t there, then Stephen couldn’t complain afterwards that she’d said Yes when she ought to have said No, could he?

But all the same, the darkness and the quiet out here in the narrow suburban garden were bewilderingly beautiful. Odd
that one should feel that it was quiet, when voices and laughter were coming from the lighted house; when cars were still passing outside, and occasional rockets from other people’s gardens were still swooping up here and there into the empty sky. But the night has a quietness of its own that seems to have nothing to do with the presence or absence of sounds, as if the darkness pressed upon the ears as well as the eyes, shutting one off from the small, lighted world, and bringing one close to the surrounding emptiness.

It was a fine night; and yet the wetness of November was everywhere; squelching up from the ground, hanging still and heavy from every twig, not dripping in the windless air but sodden, all-pervading. Even the ashes of the dying bonfire were growing damp already; Katharine could hear them stirring and shuffling unhappily in the encroaching wet. From below, from above, from every side, the wetness was winning, coming back into its own.

A sound of heavy movement nearby made Katharine start; and there, pushing down the dripping, overhung path beside the lawn came Mrs Quentin. Had she just come from the lighted house, of had she, too, been hanging about in the peaceful darkness? Katharine hadn’t heard the side door open, but then she hadn’t been listening for it. Mrs Quentin came close, breathing heavily.

“Come over to the wall, could you please, for a moment?” she asked, in an undertone: an unnecessary precaution, surely, except as a mark of deference to the huge autumnal night. “That wall down at the end where the lamp shines over.”

The Prescotts’ house stood on the corner, a wide residential road running past their wall on the side away from Katharine’s house. That must be the corner in which Jane and Angela had so joyfully discovered that they could read by the light of the street lamp, mused Katharine; and—yes—here was the little table from the greenhouse still standing where they had dragged it, and two rickety chairs as well. Heavily, but with surprising sureness, Mrs Quentin climbed on to one of them, and peered over the wall into the street.

“There!” she whispered triumphantly over her shoulder “
That’s
where I saw him—under that lamp there.” She spoke aggressively, as though clinching a long-standing argument between herself and Katharine. Just as if Katharine had been going on and on for days trying to prove that there
hadn’t
been a man there.

Katharine was annoyed. She hadn’t questioned Mrs Quentin’s story and anyway what was it to her whether it was true or not? Why make such an issue of it, when the whole thing was over and done with? Nevertheless, she climbed up on to the other chair and leaned precariously over, staring obediently down at the undistinguished blur of wet pavement indicated by her companion.

“
That’s
where he was standing,” Mrs Quentin insisted, as if Katharine was even now denying it. “Just there by the lamp-post—standing as if he was waiting for a bus, only of course there aren’t any buses down this road, are there? I’ve been telling Mary about it, and she says——”

A slight sound behind them made both women jerk round, clutching the wall for balance as the chairs lurched in
sympathetic
shock. Angela, pale and shiny-eyed, in a dark jersey and jeans, stood dimly silhouetted behind them on the wet path.

“
I
saw him too,” she announced—had she heard the whole conversation, then?—“Standing under the light just like you said, Auntie Pen. Wearing a raincoat. And he kept looking at his watch—I suppose to see if it was
time
!”
Her eyes grew rounder, more brilliant; her stance more self-important as she went on: “And then he began to walk away—slowly. I’ll show you
exactly
where he was, if you like——”

Effortlessly, Angela skidded up the six-foot wall and seated herself astride it, apparently all in one movement, with that total communion between a child and its own home wall that goes beyond mere gymnastic skill, and seems more like a sort of symbiosis between the two.

Now Angela, from her point of vantage, stared gleefully down at the pavement.