The Trouble-Makers

by Celia Fremlin

  Even while Katharine longed to hit Stella over the head with Mary’s heavy silver hairbrush, she still found herself, maddeningly, having to remember that Jack and Mavis were in fact quite pleasant, well-disposed children, who probably would want the note written. One expects, as if of right, that all boasting should be empty—that the boaster should always be a hollow sham, covering up his inadequacies by his bragging. It comes as an unpleasant shock, every time, when the boaster turns out to be quite a competent person with quite a lot to boast about. And you couldn’t get away from it, Jack and Mavis were nice children in spite of their mother’s praises of them; and she was giving them quite a good life, in spite of her ceaseless advertising of the fact. After all, there must be something to be said for having a mother who unfailingly assumes that you are the best children, your home the best home, your father the best father, your school the best school, and even your coffee-grinder the best coffee-grinder, in the whole world. Less to be said for having a neighbour like that, of course: I don’t actually have to like it, reflected Katharine with relief, as Stella’s barbed panegyric hissed to a stop and she set off down the stairs, the steps and banisters creaking in agonised chorus at her painstaking efforts to be quiet.

  Katharine had been going to follow her, but now she stood still, listening all over again, for she fancied she had heard a sound from Mary’s room. But she did not move immediately; whatever was going on, she did not want Stella to come back and get involved in it: Stella would be back up those stairs like a ball on a piece of elastic if she once got any inkling that anything more was going to happen tonight. So Katharine waited until she heard the front door close, and then hurried softly back into Mary’s room.

  Once again the room was full of damp night air and wisps of fog: once again the window was open at the bottom: and Mary herself, intent and furtive, was clambering softly back into bed. She glanced up at Katharine without surprise.

  “You shouldn’t have shut the window,” was all she said. “People keep on shutting it—it’s so tiresome. I like it open.”

  She sat, hands clasped round her knees under the bedclothes, and stared accusingly at Katharine. Her shoulders were bare above her flimsy nightdress, and Katharine could see that already she was shivering.

  “But it’s so cold, Mary,” she objected, moving in the direction of the window. “And foggy, too. You’ll be frozen.” She reached up towards the sash once more, but with a sharp cry Mary halted her.

  “No! Please not, Katharine! Please leave it alone. It’s safer, you see. I feel safer with it open.”

  “Safer? Safer from what?” Katharine felt all her former uneasiness returning. Something was going on … something was mounting to a climax; and in spite of all Mary’s confidences, all her heart-to-heart talks, there was still some vital, central fact which she was keeping to herself.

  “What are you afraid of, Mary?” she asked bluntly. “Are you afraid of Alan?”

  A curious look came on to Mary’s face—half shocked, half sly.

  “Afraid of Alan?” she asked uneasily … cautiously…. “Why should I be afraid of Alan? I’m afraid for him, naturally. The dark man—the burglar—he’s coming again tonight: I know he is. This is the night when he plans to strike again.”

  “But, Mary——!” Once and for all, Katharine meant to get this puzzle cleared up. “What do you mean, the dark man? Were you lying to me when you said there wasn’t any such man? That Alan was making it all up—that you’d stabbed him yourself?”

  Mary stared at her in the strangest way—frightened, defensive—yet somehow triumphant. Then, without warning, her eyes filled with tears.

  “It’s not fair, Katharine, to accuse me of such awful things. You promised—that day in the cafeteria—that you’d never say such a thing again. You promised. And we had a long talk, and decided it must have been the man in the raincoat. Why, it was you who were so positive about it—don’t you remember? You absolutely insisted that it must have been him. You seemed to think it was quite absurd of me to doubt it….”

  Katharine stared down at the anxious, petulant face, and understanding slowly overwhelmed her. She remembered the tepid cups of coffee, the desolate cafeteria, and she remembered her own words: “You’ll find that you’ll forget all about it yourself—really you will.”

  And it had come to pass exactly as she had prophesied. Mary had forgotten.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  FOR A LONG time that night Katharine lay awake, wondering. Wondering if she had been right to come back home like this, leaving Mary alone. Well, not alone really, because Auntie Pen was still there—and Alan was expected home, too, though not until very late. He still hadn’t come when Katharine left, but he would come, of course he would. And Mary had declared that it wasn’t him she was afraid of—not now.

  Now Mary was afraid of a ghost—a non-existent man. But how could one convince her of his non-existence? Katharine felt bewildered by the irony of the situation. She recalled again her own ill-judged insistence that Mary should try to put the truth, the real facts, out of her mind; should talk, and think, and behave, as if they did not exist. This way, Katharine had airily predicted, Mary would soon forget them herself, and all would be well.

  But I didn’t mean actually forgetting! Again Katharine experienced the blank sense of shock she had felt as the import of Mary’s peevish words had taken possession of her understanding; a sense of confronting the utterly unknown.

  But was Mary’s state of mind so utterly unknown? Wasn’t it after all within the bounds of an ordinary person’s comprehension? A highly suggestible young woman, by nature utterly frank and truthful—indeed, almost childishly devoid of guile—how would such a young woman feel when confronted by a situation in which she was prevented, in a most absolute sense, from confessing to a crime about which she felt deeply and justifiably guilty? And on to this unsteadily toppling base had been piled pressure upon pressure. First Katharine herself, urging Mary with all the weight of her friendship (and with complete disregard, she now realised, of the basic differences between Mary’s nature and her own) to forget; to disregard the truth, and to pretend to herself, day in and day out, that the false story was the true one. And then the surging, inquisitive, well-meaning hordes of Mary’s other neighbours, and her family: all of them extracting from her the false story, believing it, repeating it to each other, and then bringing it back to her, ever more vivid, ever more colourful, ever more solidly fixed in its framework of social acceptance. “Dark man in a raincoat….” “Dark man in a raincoat….” How relentlessly they had all of them, in their various ways, kept this image before Mary’s unhappy mind … pressing it deeper and deeper into her guilty conscience, into her very soul, until in agony she had cried out to Katharine: “I begin to feel I am haunted by dark men in raincoats….”

  Did that despairing cry mark the moment when the real forgetting had begun—when she could stand the pressures of suggestion no longer? Katharine remembered the evening when Mary had roamed the house like a lost, uneasy spirit, staring out into the dark gardens … locking and relocking her doors—against a non-existent man already growing real? Or was there not a precise moment of forgetting at all? Did it begin, instead, with a sort of prolonged, uneasy holding of memory in abeyance—a shrinking in horror from any threat of having recollection stirred? Again Katharine seemed to hear Mary’s urgent cry of “Hush!” on the stairs that night, when Katharine had seemed about to finish her sentence with the words, “He doesn’t exist.”?

  Wildly, crazily suggestible? Who could say, who hadn’t actually been through it as Mary had been through it? Why, even Katharine herself, scarcely involved at all, had nevertheless experienced that momentary shock of seeing a dark man in a raincoat sitting behind them on a bus—had had to recall, with a conscious effort, that the dark man in a raincoat that they had been talking about so intently was wholly imaginary, and that therefore this real man on the bus couldn’t possibly be he. And if you could experience this mom
ent of illusion after only half an hour’s concentration on the non-existence, then what would it be like after hours … and days … and weeks of it? Suggestion piled on suggestion…. Wouldn’t the false picture, always before you, gradually grow more and more vivid, until at last it filled your mind, and you would think it was the truth?

  And what then? Would the false picture remain static, or would it then begin to grow? To grow, to change … to add a false detail here … a bit of false dialogue there? Would it throw out strange, twisted side branches, thrown up of necessity from its basic, inner falsity … where … how would it all end?

  As she lay there, staring up into the swirling patterned darkness under her closed lids. Katharine began to realise that the situation had gone beyond her. It was out of control, and she did not know what to do. For a moment she had a rash impulse to rouse Stephen, to talk it over with him then and there, to ask his advice.

  But would this not be a betrayal of Mary’s confidence? Was it still a betrayal, in any ordinary sense, if Mary had herself forgotten all about it? And anyway, wasn’t the whole situation becoming too dangerous, too explosive, for promises to be still binding? When she had promised to keep Mary’s secret, it surely wasn’t a burden on this scale that she had undertaken to bear?

  So much for the ethics of it. But what about Stephen? How would he—or indeed any man—react to being woken at three in the morning to discuss such a problem? It wasn’t even as if he was already in touch with it, she’d have to explain the whole thing from the very beginning. “For pity’s sake, can’t it wait till the morning?” he’d say—and he would be right. Of course it could wait till the morning. First thing in the morning … before breakfast … before the children came down … she’d tell him all about it.

  But it didn’t work out like that. When she woke, Stephen was already up; and when she went into the kitchen to make tea there he already was; and it was he, not she, who broke the silence with the words, “There’s something I want to say to you.”

  He looked moody and tired, and Katharine felt her whole body stiffening resignedly. So there was going to be a row: Mary’s affairs would have to wait. Even though she did not know yet what the row was to be about, she could feel all her faculties already taking up their familiar positions of defence—moving up into line like a platoon of seasoned soldiers, trained and drilled over the years into absolute precision. Against a defence like this he will have to attack very, very hard, it suddenly occurred to her. Was that why he always did attack hard, even—or was it particularly?—about trifles?

  “I hear that Angela Prescott stayed the night here last Wednesday,” he began, his hand resting on the handle of the kettle, and his weight slumped warily against the sink. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Katharine stared, then laughed, with dreadful artificial lightness.

  “But Stephen, she didn’t,” she exclaimed. “Who told you she did? I suppose it was Stella?”

  It must have been Stella, of course. Katharine remembered Stella’s casual reference to Mary’s having told her that Angela was spending the night with Katharine’s children; and how she, Katharine, had not denied it; refraining from doing so out of a bewildered sense of loyalty to Mary, who presumably must have had some motive for the lie. “I don’t know how Stella got the idea,” she continued, confusedly, when Stephen still did not speak. “I suppose she must have misunderstood something Mary said. But anyway, Angela didn’t stay the night. I went over there to look after her instead.”

  Stephen didn’t even look suspicious. He just simply didn’t believe her at all.

  “I suppose you are trying to hide it from me because I’d said I thought Jane’s friendship with Angela ought to be discouraged,” he surmised wearily. “I wish you wouldn’t do this sort of thing, Katharine. I’ve given up feeling hurt at the way you tell lies to me all the time, but I still find it a nuisance.”

  “But I don’t tell lies,” began Katharine in fury—and did not know how to go on. Because, of course, she did tell lies—little, tiny, trivial ones, like that one about the washing-up mop. Such tiny ones, though. It wasn’t fair to call them lies.

  “I’d never tell lies about—well—something that mattered, like whether Angela’d stayed the night or not. Really I wouldn’t.”

  She felt baffled, affronted. Like all small-scale liars, she felt that there should be some special, super-convincing form of language that could be used when one really was speaking the truth: something that would automatically carry total conviction. It seemed more like a flaw in the language than a flaw in herself that this should not be so.

  “I wouldn’t tell a lie about a thing like that,” she could only repeat, helplessly.

  “Well, how am I to know what sort of categories are to be included in ‘like that’?” demanded Stephen. “What about that mop business the other day? You knew damn’ well that Jane had taken it for her bloody rabbit, and you pretended you’d thrown it away. What category does that come in, in your complicated system?”

  “I—I didn’t know you’d noticed,” said Katharine feebly, as if that was some kind of defence, “I mean, I don’t count it exactly a lie if it’s only to keep the peace.”

  “Well, and wouldn’t it ‘keep the peace’ as you call it to deceive me about Angela staying the night? It would stop me making a scene about it, wouldn’t it? Just like the mop. What you call ‘Keeping the peace’ simply means ‘Keeping Stephen out of it’. I think that’s what I hate most about your lying, Katharine. I’m not bothering about whether it’s wicked or not any more than you are. But every single lie you ever tell has the sole and express purpose of keeping me out of something. Out of the family’s life. Jane’s rabbit. Clare’s homework. Everything. Do you think I don’t notice?”

  Katharine had thought that he didn’t notice. There was something both terrifying and immensely stimulating in finding that he did. But for the moment she could put none of this into words.

  “Well, you always make such a fuss,” she retorted. “And you seem to hate it so, too—I mean all the children’s games—and their tiresomeness—the way I let them be a nuisance. I can’t bring them up strictly—I expect I’m too weak, or something, but anyway, I can’t. Everybody can only bring children up in the way they can bring them up,” she concluded, her eyes filling with tears. “The books all make it sound as if you have some sort of choice, but you haven’t. You have to bring them up according to the sort of person you are, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Stephen’s face had softened strangely. Wildly and forlornly the kettle boiled unnoticed, and he absently moved his hand out of range of the scalding steam.

  “I know, Katharine, I know,” he said gently. “But the same goes for me—has that never occurred to you? I can only handle them in the way I can, too: and it’s not the same way as yours, I know. But surely this must be very common? And it can’t be the answer for one parent simply to shut the other one out, just to save the trouble of sorting out conflicting methods. To the one who’s doing the shutting out I daresay it looks like ‘keeping the peace’. But to the other one—the shut out one—it looks quite different, I assure you.”

  The neglected kettle was spitting, jerking, clattering, the lid pounding up and down under the savage swell of steam. Mechanically, Katharine moved across the room and turned down the gas; and for a second, as she stood there, she thought that Stephen’s arm was about to come across her shoulder in the old caressing gesture….

  “Mummy. Do you know it’s a quarter to eight? When are you going to wake us?”

  The idiocy of Flora’s question would have made Katharine laugh if she had not been so near to tears—and so outraged by the interruption. Something like this always happened just when she and Stephen were coming to some flicker of understanding.

  Well, it was all spoilt now. Briskly, angrily, she set about preparing breakfast—hurrying the children to get dressed. The atmosphere became again busy, distant, hostile, as it so often was in the morni
ngs. And to crown all, Jane had to jump hastily up from the table the moment she had finished her breakfast and announce that she had to clean Curfew’s hutch before she went to school.

  “And could you come, Mummy, and hold him for me for a minute? You see, I’ve got to——”

  Stephen looked up irritably, maddened as always by clatter and upheaval about Curfew. As always, too, Katharine grew tense and nervous, racking her brains for some way of shelving the situation—distracting attention—blurring the issues. Like murmuring something about fetching the washing in, so that Stephen wouldn’t fully realise that she was going out to help Jane with the rabbit. They were both of them reacting in exactly the way they had always done. Nothing was changed. And then Katharine realised that in this moment, by simply behaving in her usual way, and allowing Stephen to behave in his usual way, she could allow that moment of understanding before breakfast to close over for ever.

  Quietly she stood up, followed Jane into the garden, and obediently took Curfew into her arms. But then, instead of standing there waiting till Jane was ready to have him back, she turned, and walked purposefully back into the kitchen, while Jane followed, wide-eyes and puzzled.

  “But Mummy—why?” she kept protesting; but Katharine still kept on, across the kitchen, right up to her husband’s chair.

  “Here, Stephen,” she said, clearly and confidently, “You hold Curfew for a few minutes, will you, while Jane cleans his hutch,” and, bending down, she plumped the warm, tremulous creature right into his lap.

  For a second there was absolute silence. Every single person in the kitchen knew that something new, something momentous, was occurring. The three girls stared, bewildered, tense, uncomprehending, while their father slowly recovered from his astonishment. They waited for his anger to break loose; and saw instead a slow, wondering look spread over his face. Cautiously, inexpertly, with the tip of one finger, he tickled the rabbit between its ears.