The Trouble-Makers

by Celia Fremlin

  “Look—the bus!” she exclaimed. “If we run we’ll just catch it. Quick, Flora—you run on, and tell Jane to wait when she gets to the bus stop….”

  And in the ensuing whirl of hurry, light and noise, Mary’s ill-timed confidences were indeed obliterated. It did not occur to Katharine that by the time she should again find herself alone with Mary, the chance for renewing them might be over; that it might already be too late.

  CHAPTER XX

  STEPHEN WAS STILL out when Katharine got home, and at first she felt nothing but relief. It was so easy to give the children just crisps and bread and jam for supper; so easy, too, to deal single-handed with the argument about why Flora as well as Jane should go straight to bed afterwards. Not that she dealt with it very efficiently, and certainly not very quickly; but this way at least it was only one argument. It wasn’t followed by another argument about why she allowed Flora to argue so much, and yet another about why they were always arguing about whether Flora should be allowed to argue so much.

  By half-past nine it was all over, and Katharine was sitting quiet and relaxed by the fire, with Clare chewing her penholder gently in the armchair opposite. After dawdling vaguely through the day, doing a little knitting, a little reading, and making a batch of coconut macaroons, Clare had suddenly decided to settle down to her homework after supper. And, of course, she wanted to do it by the fire in the sitting-room.

  But it was all right so far. She wasn’t crying, even though it was Latin again. Strands of straight fair hair fell across her face, as they always did when she was working, but the effect tonight was somehow pleasantly casual rather then distraught. The gentle, expressive mouth looked grave, even determined, but no longer desperate.

  As Katharine studied her daughter with cautious satisfaction, the girl looked up.

  “It’s a funny thing, Mummy,” she observed, “but I seem able to understand the gerunds quite well so long as I don’t think about them. Like the way you can see the Pleiades best if you don’t look right at them—do you know how I mean? It’s just the opposite from algebra—the more you think about that, the better you understand it. It’s very interesting, isn’t it, the different ways there are of understanding different things.”

  Katharine smiled, and with her thirteen-year-old daughter embarked boldly and cheerfully on the ancient puzzle of the Nature of Understanding. But it was Clare’s nature, of course, that she had in mind as she talked. Perhaps, after all, it hadn’t been a mistake to have sent her to the grammar school. Perhaps in her own plodding, worrying, difficult way she would get more out of it than any of them?

  And now Clare was deep in her books again, and everything was very quiet. There had been a few unexplained thuds from upstairs a few minutes ago, and a sharp, perfunctory shriek of protest; but whatever it was must have beeen settled—probably in Flora’s favour—quite quickly, for there had been no more sounds.

  The fire was dying down now, ash already beginning to whiten near the bars, but it didn’t seem worth making it up. Soon it would be bedtime. In fact it had been Clare’s bedtime long ago, but it seemed a shame to interrupt her just when she was getting on so nicely with her work. But as she sat there, lapped in quietness and what should have been peace, Katharine was aware of a now familiar uneasiness nibbling away at her tranquillity.

  How was Mary now? Should Katharine have stayed with her for a little after they got home? Had it been right to allow her, in her nervous state, to go alone into her empty, darkened house?

  Hang it all, she wasn’t Mary’s keeper, was she? And hadn’t she had enough on her hands, with her own clamorous, excited pair just back from their party; both claiming after their huge party tea, to be “starving”, and both having to be absolutely driven to bed? And anyway, Mary wouldn’t have been alone for long. Auntie Pen and Angela would probably have turned up soon, and Alan too, presumably, some time or other. Mary would have been busy enough getting a meal ready for them all—or if she hadn’t, then she ought to have been, Katharine reflected censoriously. Besides, Mary had seemed cheerful enough, almost back to normal, by the time they’d all got off the bus and hurried up the road—though Katharine was aware that she’d more or less forced normal behaviour on her companion by her own briskness, her bright, superficial chatter. And I was quite right, Katharine went on reassuring herself. It was just what Mary needed—someone to make her pull herself together and behave sensibly. Too much sympathy and attention would simply encourage her to brood, to get more wrapped up in herself than ever.

  So Katharine’s sensible, reassuring reflections ran their course, and in doing so made not the slightest dent in her growing uneasiness; her slow, unwilling consciousness that something was building up next door; was mounting, even now, to some climax; and that she, Katharine, was inextricably involved. The dying fire stirred, as yet another once glowing cinder dropped softly into darkness; Clare’s pen scratched unevenly and then stopped, poised in doubt; and Katharine sat very still, her sewing untouched in her lap, her newspaper unread at her side.

  The sudden, sharp ring at the front door was like a long-awaited summons, and Katharine leapt to her feet, her heart beating wildly. Clare glanced up, vaguely startled.

  “Who is it, Mummy?” she asked—quite absurdly from one point of view, since Katharine could not know any more than she did; and yet from another point of view quite understandably, for Katharine’s feeling of having expected just this must surely have got across to her.

  “I don’t know,” said Katharine, almost feeling that she was lying; and hurried out into the hall.

  The tall, elegant young woman in the doorway was a total stranger, and Katharine in her surprise stared almost rudely at the unfamiliar face under a cloud of high-piled hair. Delicately plucked brows arched beautifully over lustrous, greenish eyes with black, thickly mascaraed lashes. The scarlet mouth smiled confidently at Katharine as the young woman stepped, uninvited but with assurance, into the hall. There she hesitated, poised gracefully on her three-inch heels, her light blue swagger coat swaying round her.

  “Where’s Clare?” she asked. “I’ve forgotten the Latin homework again, and old Fossie’ll be furious, so I …”

  Katharine’s mind lurched into focus … spinning as down a helter-skelter in the effort of adjustment. So this glittering vision was simply Brenda Forbes, whom Katharine had last seen (surely only a few weeks back?) as an inky schoolgirl, barely as tall as Clare, her satchel bumping against her stout bare legs as she ran for the school bus.

  “Of course. Come along in, Brenda,” gulped Katharine, still trying to readjust herself to the transformation, and led the visitor into the sitting-room.

  Clare greeted her classmate without any great enthusiasm, but without surprise, and soon the two girls were crouched on the sofa, marking pages in Clare’s Latin book, and arguing about whether Miss Foster had said they could or they couldn’t leave out questions 8 and 9 because they weren’t about the pluperfect subjunctive. One of Brenda’s three-inch heels was tucked awkwardly under her as she sat, coat rumpled, just where she had flung herself, the other had fallen from her foot, inky under its 15-denier nylon, and lay on its side under the table. Feeling that perhaps the transformation in Brenda was less than she had at first supposed, Katharine left them to it, and went into the kitchen to tidy up and put things ready for the morning.

  But it was hard to concentrate. All those useful, and indeed perfectly justifiable, thoughts about Mary’s affairs being none of her business, and about the whole thing being a lot of hysterical nonsense anyway—all these thoughts seemed to whirr in her mind like so many road drills, both distracting and meaningless. By the time Brenda had been got out of the house, and Clare had been sent gradually to bed, Katharine’s feeling of impending disaster had become unbearable. Softly she unbolted the scullery door and stepped out into the night.

  From here, at the far end of the lawn, just before you stepped backwards into the brussels sprouts, you could see all the Prescott back windo
ws—and the lights were on in every single one.

  Was this a good sign, or a bad one? What, indeed, had Katharine expected to discover by staring up at the windows? She had started out into the garden simply on impulse—a sudden, unreasoning dread lest the windows should still be as dark, the house as silent, as when she had let Mary go into it on her own three or four hours ago. But even if they had been, what would it have signified? Probably simply that the whole family were already in bed and asleep—and why not, at half-past ten on a wet winter’s night?

  Katharine shivered a little in the heavy, autumn air. Not that it was cold, exactly: only wet, and dismal, and forbidding. And it certainly wasn’t dark; all those lighted windows, even though most of them were curtained, threw a suffused, shapeless brightness over the gardens. Katharine, standing here, must be clearly visible to anyone who cared to look.

  Even as the thought crossed her mind, Katharine was aware of a sudden movement behind the curtains at one of the Prescotts’ windows—Mary’s bedroom window, Katharine recognised in the instant. A darkness—a shadow, a something too vague to be called a silhouette—appeared at the join of the curtains. For a moment they swung apart, and a streak of brilliant light flashed across the garden…. Then they closed again.

  Nothing in it, of course. Someone had simply pulled them apart for a second, readjusting them, and then dropped them back again. Nothing extraordinary: there could be a thousand reasons for such a gesture.

  But of these thousand reasons, only one found a foothold in Katharine’s tense, alerted mind tonight. Suddenly involuntarily, and with distracting vividness, she recalled the evening last week when she had been sitting in with Angela: recalled the swift, silent way Mary had slipped between the long curtains of the sitting-room, and then had stood there, behind them, for long minutes, staring out into the gardens. And had never, in the end, explained to Katharine at what she was staring.

  At this very moment Mary might once again be standing up there in the darkness, silently staring down at Katharine—who was silently staring up towards her. An eerie, almost superstitious terror kept Katharine for a moment standing absolutely still…. Though, of course, this was the worst thing she could possibly do if Mary was watching. She seemed to hear again Mary’s absurd accusation earlier in the evening “Why are you following me, Katharine?” To stand staring like this, motionless and in silence, would surely give foundation to whatever idiotic suspicion Mary was harbouring.

  Quickly, idiotically, Katharine began trying to behave naturally in her unsought limelight. She bent down, pretending to examine the brussels sprouts—as if anyone could in this darkness! Then she pretended she was pulling up a weed—as if anyone would at this time of night! And then, her meagre resources at an end, she simply fled: across the lawn, and into the blessed anonymous darkness of the side passage with the dustbins.

  Well! Of all the silly, childish ways to behave! And probably Mary hadn’t been watching anyway, Katharine scolded herself, as she felt her way along the passage, crashing first into Curfew’s tin of sawdust and then into the broken mowing machine that the dustmen wouldn’t take.

  But still, just in case Mary had been watching, Katharine ought to go round and apologise. Well, not apologise, exactly, but explain … get out of it somehow before Mary got any more odd, suspicious ideas into her head. And if it turned out that Mary hadn’t seen her—well, no harm would be done. Half-past ten wasn’t so very late to be calling on a close friend, especially when they were all so obviously wide awake, with all those lights on everywhere.

  CHAPTER XXI

  IT WAS NOT Mary who answered the door, but Auntie Pen. She showed neither pleasure nor surprise at Katharine’s visit, but led her matter-of-factly into the sitting-room, ordered rather than invited her so sit in one of the two armchairs by the bare hearth, and then seated herself, very straight, in the one opposite.

  “Well?”

  Mrs Quentin’s tone was not encouraging: but nor, on the other hand, did it demand any great politeness in Katharine’s response. So she replied, almost equally brusquely: “I came to see Mary, really. Is she around?” Then, as Mrs Quentin did not answer, but simply sat there watching as if waiting for Katharine to incriminate herself in some way, Katharine found herself, quite against her will, becoming apologetic.

  “I’m sorry to butt in on you so late. It was just that—well—I wanted to see Mary. I wanted to see that she was all right.”

  “And why shouldn’t she be?”

  Mrs Quentin was shooting out her questions like little sharp pebbles from a catapult. Her hostility was unmistakable. The black, snapping eyes rested on Katharine’s face censoriously, just as they had done in the bus queue that first evening. But what was it all about? What had Katharine done? She tried to answer Mrs Quentin’s question reasonably.

  “Just that she seemed a little—upset—this evening,” she explained carefully. “She was all alone in the house … and wasn’t sure when anyone would be back….” Her voice slithered to a stop as the black eyes raked her face, fury mounting in their glittering depths.

  “‘Mary seemed a little upset.’” Mrs Quentin quoted mockingly. “Only a little, eh? And after all the time and trouble you’ve spent—you and your chattering, gossiping, back-biting friends—hovering round my poor Mary with your crocodile sympathy … your curiosity … your vulgar, unfeeling, prying, vicious scandal-mongering….”

  Mrs Quentin’s voice choked on the flood of her own epithets, and Katharine stared at her aghast. The tiny thread of truth that her conscience could detect in the intemperate accusations only served to sharpen her astonishment. And in any case, of what significance was this tiny thread, embedded as it was in such a vast, warm, generous tangle of genuine concern for Mary; of real kindness, of desire to help?

  “I—we—were only trying to help,” Katharine began dazedly to stammer out her thoughts. “You know—we were sort of rallying round——”

  “‘Rallying round!’ That’s what you call it! And I suppose that’s what your friend Stella calls it when she starts lecturing Mary about her ‘unconscious agression’ when a pair of scissors happens to fall out of her handbag! And I suppose Mrs Forsyth calls it ‘rallying round’ too, when she comes prying and needling and trying to trap Mary into saying that she hates Alan. Just because Mrs Forsyth hates and despises her husband, she loves to feel that other women hate and despise theirs. It makes her feel better about it. It makes Stella feel better too, but in a different way. She loves to watch Mary messing up her life because it shows up how marvellously she, Stella, is managing hers. Everything lovely in her garden—that’s Stella; and to keep it looking that way, of course, everything has to be pretty frightful in everyone else’s garden.”

  “And me? What am I supposed to be getting out of it?” asked Katharine in a tone of icy sarcasm that helped to mask her uneasy knowledge of the answer. But the answer was more hurtful even than her conscience had warned her.

  “Oh, you! You’re just another Mrs Forsyth, only feebler. You don’t say the really nasty things—Oh no. You just enjoy letting Mrs Forsyth do it for you. You get all the fun that way, and a reputation for being a little less spiteful than the others. But you’re not: not by the least fraction. There’s not a pin to choose between the lot of you, that’s the truth. You’re just a gang of trouble-makers—all of you engaged on the same activity, stropping your egos on Mary’s troubles like cows scratching themselves on a gate … until, finally, between them they break it down. Yes, they break it down. Do you realise that between you you’re driving Mary insane?”

  The anger was receding from the black eyes now; they looked sombre, desolate. Katharine felt her own anger seeping away, leaving a sharp pity for this uncompromising woman whose harsh and hard-won wisdom had shown her so much of the truth—and yet had blinded her to so much. Katharine answered gently, and with absolute honesty.

  “You’re quite right,” she said slowly. “I admit it. Everything you say is true—but it’s not
all of the truth. We do have these awful spiteful, selfish motives, exactly as you say—but we also really do want to help. We really do care about Mary—at the same time as being spiteful. Can’t you understand that? Perhaps it’s because you’re not a born gossip yourself,” Katharine smiled a little ruefully, “you don’t understand the—the sort of warmth there is about it. Take me, for instance—I’m a born gossip, so I can understand if from both sides. Of course I know that when I’m not there my friends gossip about me just as much as I do about them when they’re not there. They say the most dreadful things about me—I’m certain they do. But I don’t mind. Can’t you understand that? Of course, now and again one feels the spitefulness like a sort of prick—but it seems a trifle compared with the all-over warm feeling of knowing that people are interested. Even if nobody stirs a finger actually to help you—and even you must admit that they sometimes do—but even if they don’t, I still think that to have your troubles chewed over, picked to pieces, and put together again—it gives you a feeling of support. I don’t quite know how to describe it, but it would take an awful lot of spite to cancel out that feeling. For me it would, anyway.”

  “For you, perhaps, but what about Mary?”

  Mrs Quentin spoke thoughtfully: the belligerent air was gone. “Mary isn’t a born gossip, you see, any more than she’s a born doormat, which is what she’s tried to make of herself for years, for Alan’s sake. Not that Alan would have liked it if she’d succeeded, any more than he likes what he’s got now. He liked her as she was when he married her—light-hearted, simple, rather tomboyish. Everything that he wasn’t, in fact. She had all the qualities that he lacked—all the qualities that he needed, to get him out of his narrow, prim ways….”

  “But if he liked her like that …?” queried Katharine tentatively; and Mrs Quentin banged her fist agonisedly on the table.