The Trouble-Makers (4 page)

I
N THAT SINGLE
moment Katharine’s sense of recognition was complete and beyond doubt or argument. It was only after they had moved into the brightly lighted sitting-room and the newcomer had removed her coat, that Katharine began to wonder if she had been wrong. For with the black coat gone, with the down-turned corners of the mouth lifted in a smile, with the hostile look in the black eyes replaced by the friendly animation suitable to the first greetings between strangers, the woman did indeed look quite different. Moreover, she showed no signs of recognising Katharine.

Full of uncertainty, Katharine felt some uneasiness about confiding in the newcomer, but Stella naturally had no such inhibitions. Indeed, she seemed by now to have developed a somewhat proprietary attitude towards the whole business, and ushered Auntie Pen into the study and showed her the bloodstains with the air of a house-agent displaying a desirable property.

Mrs Quentin (for such they had learned was Auntie Pen’s name) did not seem shocked, nor even very much surprised; but her face changed in some indefinable way as Stella went on talking, so that Katharine once again felt sure that this was indeed the woman in the bus queue. After staring, thoughtfully rather than with horror, at the desk and at the floor, Mrs Quentin turned towards Stella, checking her flow of narrative with an impatient half-patronising gesture.

“I see,” she said slowly. “I’m beginning to understand.” Then, more briskly, and with a hint of apology in her smile: “This has been a dreadful shock for you both, I realise now. I’m sorry. I really am. I should have rung up or something.
… But do let me assure you that nothing very dreadful has occurred——”

“Then you know——”

“What is it, then——?”

Katharine and Stella both spoke at once, and Mrs Quentin smiled again, deprecatingly.

“No, no. I don’t know
exactly
what has happened, any more than you do. But I do know that no one has been seriously hurt. Mary—Mrs Prescott—rang up to tell me that Alan—my brother, you know—has had a slight accident with a knife and is in hospital. It’s not serious, you understand; he will probably be out again tomorrow. But the wound has to be stitched, you see. Nothing to keep him laid up for long——”

She stopped, and looked her two companions straight in the eyes—almost, Katharine fancied, as if defying them to
disbelieve
her or to ask any more questions. And Katharine, indeed, could not for the moment think of any more to ask. Her mind was fully if foolishly occupied in calculating how this old—or at least elderly—woman could possibly be Mary’s sister-in-law. She could, though. After all, Alan must be at least fifty—it was only because he was Mary’s husband, and Mary was so much younger, that they all thought of him as the same sort of age as themselves. He could easily have a sister ten years older than himself, or more….

But while Katharine’s mind was tracing out this byway of irrelevant curiosity, Stella’s had kept zestfully to the point. She was bombarding Mrs Quentin with questions of every kind, ranging from the wholly reasonable to the nearly impertinent. When had it all happened? When had Mary rung up? Why had Mrs Quentin come to give Angela tea in the first place? And then gone away again?
Where
was Alan wounded?

Mrs Quentin was no longer smiling: she was watching Stella guardedly as the questions rattled forth; and when she replied to this last question she seemed to be choosing her words carefully. Her brother had been wounded in the upper arm, she said, clearly and primly; and it was an accident.

Such finality did she put into the word that even Stella was
silenced. For a few seconds no one spoke, though it seemed to Katharine that the whole room was a-whisper with the unspoken question that must be filling the three minds: namely, what sort of task would a man have to be engaged on to wound himself in the upper arm by accident? Pencil-sharpening? Wood-carving? Cutting bread? You’d have to be a
contortionist
to manage it.

But, anyway, he was all right; no harm had been done. Oddly, all three women broke the silence simultaneously with words to this effect. But the only thing was, where was Mary now? Apparently she had rung up Auntie Pen from the
hospital
at about nine o’clock, and Auntie Pen had understood from her then that she would be leaving for home almost at once.

“And she still isn’t back,” commented Katharine, looking at her watch. “It’s after eleven. What do you think can have happened? Should we ring the hospital?”

But Mrs Quentin thought not.

“There’s no need to rush her, now I’m here,” she said. “I can stay the night if necessary, so Angela will be all right. Mary’s probably had to stay to sign forms or something. Or maybe he’s been given an anaesthetic, and she wants to see him when he comes out of it. Anyway, there’s nothing to worry about.”

Nothing to worry about. It was as if Stella had been waiting for these words as for a green light at a crossroads. Now it would be all right to say something a teeny bit nasty about Mary.

“I’m surprised Angela can’t come home from school and get her own tea,” she commented, cautiously feeling her way out of the unaccustomed charitableness forced on her by the events of the last two or three hours. “I’d have thought a child of ten—a
secure
child—would be able to do that.”

Mrs Quentin looked at her appraisingly.

“Yes—I suppose so,” she said non-committally. “But it didn’t matter—I was quite pleased to come. I’ve been out of town a long time, you know, and I was glad of the chance to see Angela again. I’ve always been fond of the child.
Besides,” she went on cautiously, “I didn’t think it was just a question of Angela’s tea. When Mary asked me to come—when she rang me up this afternoon—I got the impression that she was—well—in a bit of a state. You know—well, you must do, being neighbours—you must know that Mary doesn’t always get on too well with my brother, so when she rang up sounding so—so upset—I thought perhaps she might have left him again——”

Mrs Quentin stopped: feeling, perhaps, that she was being indiscreet, carried away by the lateness of the hour and the illusory intimacy of shared anxiety.

“And has she? Left him, I mean?”

Stella’s gusto was almost indecent, and Mrs Quentin stiffened.

“Well—obviously not,” she replied dryly. “There she is, in hospital with him, waiting anxiously for him to come round. A devoted wife. She really is, you know, in her own way.”

The last sentence was spoken in such a way as to give the lie to any suspicion of sarcasm in the preceding phrase. Stella looked a little downcast. It had been such fun when Mary had left Alan before—she’d cried for nearly a week when she came back, letting the neighbours give her good advice all the time, and telling them about all the awful things Alan did. And now here was Alan’s sister who might, handled carefully, be induced to tell then about all the awful things Mary did. Expertly, Stella surveyed the possible openings. Not a blatant question, of course; it would have to be something sympathetic—and it must also suggest that they already knew so much about Mary’s affairs that it wouldn’t be disloyal of Mary’s sister-in-law to discuss her with them.

“Of course, anything like that is so disturbing to children,” Stella began. “Particularly to Angela, of course. Being an adopted child, she’s be bound to feel it more.”

“Oh—so you knew she was adopted?”

The ruse was working. No, it wasn’t. Praise, not criticism
was to follow: “I think she’s a happy child, all the same. Not an anxious one.”

“Not anxious!” Stella was outraged. “Look how nervous she was this evening, just at finding herself alone in the house! Did you notice, Katharine, how she clung to us, following us about every step we took? And so reserved, too, and so repressed. A normal child would have been crying.”

“She was shy, naturally,” Katharine pointed out. “Any of mine would have been the same if they’d had to go in to Mary in a similar situation.”

Stella looked at her pityingly, and Katharine realised that she had merely exposed her own children to similar charges. Shyness was doubtless another of the troubles that simply didn’t arise at Wetherby Hall. She shifted her ground.
“Anyone
would have been worried, whatever their age,” she argued.
“We
were worried, if it comes to that.”

“Yes, of course we were; but then Angela hadn’t the same reason. She didn’t know about the bloodstains. Didn’t you notice that the study was the one room she didn’t follow us into?”

Katharine had noticed; and suddenly the oddness of this fact struck her with full force. She had assumed that it was a lucky coincidence that Angela should have tired of the search just then. But was it? Gould it not be that Angela was
deliberately
avoiding that room? Avoiding it because she had been in it already: knew what was to be seen there; and did not want to see it again?

Katharine was just about to suggest this possibility, but something—a sort of weariness—held her back. She would only be told that such behaviour in a ten-year old argued unhealthy secretiveness of a sort characteristic of adopted children who are about to go in for the eleven-plus, and that Jack and Mavis would have behaved quite differently in similar circumstances, and anyway circumstances like these simply didn’t arise at Wetherby Hall, as indeed they probably didn’t. And in any case, the conversation had now shifted from Angela to the parents.

“Of course, my brother is a very reserved man,” Mrs Quentin was saying. “As well as being so much older than Mary. I don’t imagine he is very easy to live with—especially for a girl like Mary, so open and impetuous by nature, though of course marriage has changed her a lot. I always said he should have married a Victorian heroine sort of girl—an
ultra-feminine
type who would twist him round her little finger. But Mary’s the type of girl who never uses her little finger where fists will do: she insists on head-on collisions when she wants her own way. Or did. As I say, she’s changed.”

“And
I
think she shouldn’t
let
herself be changed,” burst out Stella. “Head-on collisions are healthy. They’re honest. Every marriage should be based on absolute honesty, collisions and all.”

Mrs Quentin looked at her a little pityingly.

“Absolute honesty couldn’t fail to wreck even the best of marriages,” she observed, with a sort of sad certainty; and then, as Stella stared at her, she elaborated: “Or rather, I should say absolute honesty on the part of
both
partners. It’s all right for one of them to be totally honest so long as the other is willing to undertake all the necessary deceptions. By this means one partner is enabled to glory in his egocentric honesty, while the other struggles to keep the marriage going; and for him—or her—there is no glory.”

She fell silent, with a look of brooding melancholy which set Katharine speculating about a possibly non-existent Mr Quentin. Was he—had he been—an inveterate truth-teller? Had Auntie Pen shed him somewhere along the line—divorced or separated? Or was she a widow? Or—possibly—was she just an ordinary married woman, with Mr Quentin sitting at home right now, with one eye on the clock, waiting to embark on some more than usually forceful truth-telling? Just look at the time—nearly twelve o’clock!

Katharine got up from her chair. There was absolutely no reason for staying any longer, now that Auntie Pen was here. And yet—she hesitated. It was so queer that Mary wasn’t back. Her husband’s injury was not serious: what could be
keeping her so long? Why hadn’t she at least rung up—sent some message? As she stood hesitating, Katharine saw Mrs Quentin’s eyes fixed on her just as they had been in the bus queue, with the same thoughtful, faintly hostile intensity. They seemed to be delving deep into her thoughts … boring for samples into her very soul.

“Yes—you must be very tired,” was all the older woman said at the end of this deep scrutiny. “I’m sure you’re both dying to get home and go to bed. Please don’t feel you have to stay any longer; everything’s under control.”

She stood up briskly; and then, as if there had been no interruption of her former train of thought, she added:

“And so, you see, I always feel it is fairer if
both
partners take their share of the necessary deceptions.”

Whether this remark was addressed to Stella, or to Katharine, or simply to the world at large, it was impossible to tell. Katharine only knew that it added somehow to the obscure uneasiness she felt about leaving the house with Mary’s absence still unexplained. Still, Mrs Quentin was in charge. She must really be kind and sensible—look how fond Angela was of her; how pleased—how comforted and reassured—she had seemed on hearing that Auntie Pen was coming. Children’s instincts could be relied on in these matters—or so everyone said, and who was Katharine to query so universally held an opinion, and at twelve o’clock at night, too.

She ran quietly down the Prescotts’ steps in the still, damp air of midnight, and quickly up the adjoining ones to her own front door, closing it softly behind her as she went in.

The light in the hall was still on; her note to Stephen was still lying on the little table where she had left it. Katharine was seized with a sudden anger close to tears. So he hadn’t even bothered to read it! He didn’t care where she was or what she was doing at this hour of the night. He would be asleep by now, no doubt, and certainly she wasn’t going to risk waking him. She did not know whether it was anger at the unread note that brought her to this decision, or fear of starting a
quarrel, or even consideration for Stephen’s night’s rest after his long day at work. What ever it was, she did not go up to bed: instead, she passed a brief, uncomfortable night on the sitting-room couch, waking at half past six, stiff and dazed, to the unaccustomed sound of someone else doing the washing up.

F
OR A FEW MINUTES
Katharine lay still, trying to feel grateful. It was Stephen, of course; Stephen must have noticed that she had gone out last night without washing up the supper things, and had decided to get up early and do them for her. It was terribly nice of him. Any wife would appreciate it.

So Katharine rounded up her thoughts and tried to compel them in the direction they should go. But it was no use. Trying to coerce one’s thought was like that frantic stirring of an egg custard after it has already begun to curdle: you know that the change is irrevocable, and that it will never be smooth again, and yet you go on stirring, compulsively.

The trouble was that it always seemed to Katharine that Stephen only washed up when he was annoyed with her. But what could he be annoyed about this time? Something she had said—done? Or something she had not said—not done? Or something about the children? Surely Clare couldn’t still have been crying about her Latin when he came in last night? And telling him, with that admirable, catastrophic frankness of hers, exactly how much her mother had helped her with it? Katharine wriggled off her uncomfortable couch, pulled on her dressing-gown, and went out into the hall.

At the kitchen door she stopped, adjusting a grateful smile on her face as she might have adjusted a slipping shoulder strap. For after all, even if Stephen always washed up in anger, it didn’t follow that he washed up out of spite. On the contrary, he probably did it rather as she had brought that nice crusty bread last night—a forlorn attempt to make up in trifling material ways for the empty or unkind feelings towards her that were beyond his control. Was he beginning to hate
crusty bread, just as she hated being helped with the washing up?

This feeling that they were fellow-sufferers of each other—that they were each painfully evolving the same hopeless techniques for dealing with the same unwelcome emotions—moved Katharine strangely. A stab of rare tenderness towards her husband suddenly changed the carefully adjusted smile on her face into a real smile, bewildered, sad, and loving. If Stephen had turned round at once when she came into the room, he would have seen it. But he didn’t; he went on
scrubbing
fiercely at a saucepan for several seconds. By the time he did turn round, it was too late; everything had already gone wrong.

For Stephen was not looking in the least as Katharine had pictured him during that moment as she stood outside the door. If only he had been padding brusquely and clumsily about in his old brown dressing-gown, his hair still standing sleepily on end! It wouldn’t have mattered, then, even if he had looked a bit cross as he turned round. But instead, he was already dressed, neatly and completely, in his dark town suit; his hair was smartly smoothed down, and his face already wore the aloof, preoccupied, business-man look which went with these clothes. Not even the touching absurdity of a frilly apron had been allowed to soften the picture; instead he was protecting his suit with a tea towel tied round so stiff and straight as to seem almost to belong with the rest of the outfit. Briskly and irritably he was pitching knives and forks off the plates into the hot water, and stacking the plates themselves into an angry tower. He hardly glanced at
Katharine
as she stood in the doorway trying to replace the fading, useless smile in her lips. Perhaps, even now, if she ran across the room to him….

“Why don’t we have a washing-up mop, like other people? Just look at this!”

Stephen held up the tattered remnant of old towelling that Katharine had got so used to during its weeks of service that she had not noticed its advancing senility. It did look rather
awful; but all the same, Stephen didn’t have to hold it out ostentatiously between his finger and thumb like that. He must have been using it without demur all the time until she came into the room; why had it suddenly become so repulsive
now
?

“We
have
got a mop,” she countered defensively. “It’s——”

But it wasn’t, of course. And then Katharine remembered that Jane must have taken it for cleaning her rabbit hutch. It was the only thing that would go right into the corners, Jane said; and though Katharine had told her that No, she mustn’t have it, she had known, even at the time, that she wasn’t saying it in the tone of voice which would actually prevent Jane taking it; and she knew that Jane knew that she knew that she wasn’t; so in a way you couldn’t really say that it was disobedience on Jane’s part at all.

Though of course Stephen wouldn’t see it like that. He would say that it
was
disobedience, and that if there was any more of this sort of thing the rabbit would have to be got rid of; and Jane would cry, and then Clare would butt in with some tactless argument—tactless as only Clare could make it—in Jane’s defence; and then there would be a frightful row all through breakfast, and by that time Clare would be crying too, and that would make her forget her hockey boots, and she would miss her train coming back for them, and that would mean she would get into trouble for being late and would come home miserable about it, and then there would be another row about why is Clare always in trouble at school? …

This vista of alternate tears and rows, without foreseeable end, seemed to Katharine at that moment to justify any kind of lie, black or white, that she could think of quickly enough.

“I forgot; it was worn out and I meant to get a new one,” she improvised hastily, assuring herself by some blurred and devious reasoning that it wasn’t really a lie because she really
was
going to stop Jane using the mop for the rabbit hutch in future.

“I can’t understand,” Stephen was saying, flicking cups upside down on to the draining board with an ostentatious efficiency far greater—it seemed to Katharine—than could
possibly be needed for so simple a task; “I can’t understand why you don’t keep stocks of the things you need, like other women. This mop business is typical. You wait until your old one is worn out and thrown away before you think of buying another. It’s the same with everything in this house. There’s never any soap in the bathroom. The black shoe polish is——”

“I bought a new tin yesterday,” snapped Katharine. “I just haven’t put it out on the shelf yet, that’s all. And as for the soap, there’s been exactly once, in the last six months, when——”

She heard her own voice, rising shrill and shrewish, and stopped in disgust. There was some truth in his complaints, of course. She
was
careless about this sort of thing, and she might have admitted it handsomely if it hadn’t been for that
infuriating
“like other women”.
What
other women? On what grounds was he so certain that all other women were such models of housewifely efficiency? Let him ask some of the other husbands, that’s all! What a pity men didn’t gossip about their wives the way women did about their husbands, then they would soon learn that their own wife wasn’t the only one with
shortcomings
…. What were they really quarrelling about,
anyway
, she and Stephen? Was it really about soap, and shoe polish, and washing-up mops?

“Didn’t you see my note last night?”

She thrust the query without warning into the middle of their bickering, surprising even herself by its irrelevance. It was no wonder that Stephen stared at her stupidly for a moment.

“Your note?” he repeated blankly.

“Yes, I left you a note on the hall table, where I always do. Telling you where I was last night. You didn’t notice I wasn’t in bed, I suppose?”

She wished she had left out this bitter little tailpiece, but it was too late now. Stephen looked at her wearily, with a quite uncalled-for air (it seemed to Katharine) of being nagged and henpecked.

“Honestly, Katharine, I came in absolutely worn out at God knows what hour, and I staggered up to bed, and when I
found you weren’t there, I dragged myself back as far as the top of the stairs, and saw that there
was
a note on the table, but I was too tired to bother to go down and read it.”

Katharine felt as if she had been slapped. Her spirit tingled like smarting skin.

“You were?” was all she could find to say in her anger and hurt.

“I was. And anyway, I knew what it would say. What your notes always say: ‘Gone to Mary Prescott’s. Back in half an hour.’ Meaning you’ll be back in about four hours, as Mary’s had another
frrrrightful
row with her
frrrrightful
husband, and wouldn’t I like to hear all about it?”

In spite of himself, Stephen’s voice was growing amused now, warm. In a moment Katharine too would have been laughing at the absolute rightness of his guess….

“Mummy! Where’s my clean blouse?”

But it wasn’t Flora’s shouting over the bannisters that destroyed the moment: it was Katharine’s shouting back. And yet what else could she do, with Flora’s breath already indrawn for another, more imperative “Mummy!”?

“Hush, dear, don’t shout so! It’s in the——”

Oh, bother! She hadn’t even ironed it yet; it was still damp and crushed up in the pile left when Angela interrupted her last night.

“Wait a minute, Flora,” she yelled—a self-contradictory sort of yell, trying to be loud enough for Flora to hear from the upstairs landing, and yet soft enough for Stephen, right beside her, not to feel that it was interrupting their conversation. “I’ll bring it up in a minute,” she went on, desperately, and wondered if Flora knew as well as she did that it would be ten minutes at least. And it was already twenty past seven, and she hadn’t woken Clare yet—Glare, who would sleep till lunch time unless roused over and over again.

“Wake Clare for me, will you, Flora,” she yelled once more, aware of Stephen’s stiffening irritation at the tumult; and switching on the iron, she set to work on the blouse.

And then, like a film unwinding, everything began to
happen exactly as Katharine had foretold. First, Clare came down to breakfast very late and very sleepy, carrying a pair of hockey boots so muddy that not even the kitchen floor could reasonably be expected to house them, and Katharine told her to put them outside the back door till after breakfast. In a sleep-walking sort of way, and mercifully without argument, Clare obeyed, and came back looking a little less stupefied.

“Look, Mummy,” she announced amiably, “I’ve found the washing-up mop. It was on top of Curfew’s hutch.”

She thrust the unwelcome object towards Katharine. Rabbitty sawdust dripped incriminatingly over floor and table, and Stephen looked up sharply.

“I thought you said you’d thrown it away?” he accused; and Katharine clutched the abominable thing almost
protectively
.

“Yes——I meant——That is——” She stopped; for the mop looked horribly healthy in spite of the damp and the sawdust. New, and plump, and fluffy it was; no one in their senses would have thrown it away. However, Stephen was in the middle of some gloomily absorbing bit of the paper; he might even now have let the whole thing slide if only it hadn’t been for the awful lack of any instinct for self-preservation on the part of any of the children.

“Oh, Mummy, I’m sorry!” gasped Jane disastrously. “I
did
mean to bring it back, and I
did
mean to wash it, like anything! I was going to wash it and wash it, so that there
couldn’t
be any germs! I’ll do it now if you like.”

She jumped up, scraping her chair back noisily, snatched up the mop with a fresh shower of sawdust, and tripping over her satchel on the way, she plunged towards the sink. No father on earth, however deeply immersed in however apocalyptic a morning paper, could possibly fail to notice the commotion. Stephen looked up indignantly.

“Have you been using that mop for the rabbit hutch again, Jane?” he asked. “I thought I heard Mummy telling you not to, days ago.”

“No, well, you see, Daddy, it was only just for this once,” she explained eagerly. “You see, Curfew’s sawdust had got awfully wet, and there were all bits of bread in it—I
wish
people wouldn’t keep giving him bread, Curfew hates bread—and you see, as it’s Curfew’s birthday on Saturday——”

If only, thought Katharine, watching helplessly from the wings, if only she wouldn’t keep bringing in the creature’s name so much. If only she would refer to him as “the rabbit”. For among the multifarious aspects of Jane’s rabbit that annoyed Stephen, this name “Curfew” was one of the most provocative. Indeed, Katharine herself had been rather taken aback at the time of the christening, and had asked Jane, rather doubtfully, but
why?

“Oh,
Mummy,”
Jane had replied, a little patronisingly. “He’s called after the Curfew in the poem, of course. Don’t you know it? ‘The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day’——?”

She quoted the line solemnly, raptly. It was plain that she found it beautiful. But what on earth did she think it meant? Did she think that a curfew was some sort of small animal? And if so, what did she think “tolls” meant? And “knell”? What, in the name of sense and reason, could be the picture in her mind as she chanted the words in unison with her classmates in 2
A
? Katharine hadn’t quite liked to ask her point blank: it seemed a pity to disillusion her—especially when disillusion would involve a whole new fuss about what the rabbit was to be called, all over again. And anyway, it was all rather sweet, in a way….

But when Katharine told him about it, Stephen hadn’t thought it was rather sweet at all. He simply thought that it showed how appallingly Jane was being taught in her primary school, and how appallingly inattentive she must be. He went on and on about it—how heedless and scatter-brained Jane was becoming (which was Katharine’s fault); and going on to how crazy the State educational system was (which you’d have thought was Katharine’s fault too, the way he glared at her). Luckily, his annoyance wasn’t sufficient to make him propose taking Jane away from her school—where, after all,
she was very happy, and learned, by fits and starts, a surprising amount of quite complicated arithmetic: but it was sufficient to cause him an extra stab of irritation every time he heard the rabbit referred to by its ridiculous name. The rabbit and Jane’s educational deficiencies were now firmly and inextricably intertwined in his mind: and if only Jane could
understand
this—or no—understanding was too much to ask; if only she could have some sort of
instinct
about it, the way children were supposed to have…. If only, one way or another, she would stop
saying
it—“Curfew…. Curfew…. Curfew….” Couldn’t she
see
how it was all bound to end? …