The Trouble-Makers Read online

  Oh, they were fine, Stella assured her. Just fine. Getting on marvellously. Loving every minute.

  As to which there seemed no more to be said. That was the trouble with Stella now; by sending her children to a school so remote geographically and so Utopian in operation, she had, as it were, put herself outside the conversational orbit of her former friends. All the dear, familiar topics—the problems about bedtimes, teachers, boy-friends, homework—all these now extracted from Stella only one comment, always the same: “Well, you see, at Wetherby Hall that sort of thing simply doesn’t arise”. This seemed to apply to absolutely everything, from sexual precocity to not liking custard, and consequently left extraordinarily little to talk about to her fellow mothers. Stella’s interest in other mother’s problems was still unabated, it is true; but there was a sort of gap where her own should have been.

  So Katharine struggled to think of something else to talk about. No inspiration came to her, except to send Clare to bed; and that proved an unfortunate move. As Clare slowly piled one battered book on top of another preparatory to taking them upstairs, Stella’s face took on a beaky, excited look, like a terrier, as she scented the educational rat-race:

  “Do you always have as much homework as this, Clare?” she asked, with monstrous sympathy “Don’t you get terribly tired?”

  Clare thought this over in her slow way.

  “Not terribly,” she answered at last, as though she had measured the word against some exact scale before rejecting it. “It’s just on Thursdays, you see. We have four homeworks on Thursdays, with geometry and Latin. Latin always takes me ages.”

  “Mavis doesn’t have any homework at all,” responded Stella, as if this fact should somehow lighten Clare’s problem. “In fact, she doesn’t even have to go to lessons if she doesn’t want to. And the funny thing is, she finds she learns more that way than when she was being forced into it! Isn’t that odd?”

  The patronising cat! thought Katharine crossly: she doesn’t think it’s odd at all; she’s just trying to show us how marvellous her methods are compared with ours! She was immediately shamed by the look of clear, uncomplicated interest which Clare had turned on their guest. Stella, too, must have been a little taken aback, for she pressed her point home clumsily: “Don’t you think you’d learn more, Clare, if you were at a school like that, where they didn’t force you?”

  Clare was silent for a moment, her grey eyes thoughtful under the tear-swollen lids.

  “No,” she said at last. “I don’t think I would. I think I’d mean to work, but I’d keep not doing it.” She smiled a little apologetically: “But I expect that’s just me. I expect Mavis is different.”

  Stella looked almost affronted at Clare’s total lack of defensiveness; her complete unawareness that either she or her way of life were under fire. Stella turned towards Katharine almost pleadingly, as to a fellow warrior who, although an enemy, did at least know that there was a war on:

  “Don’t you find it tiring, yourself?” she enquired. “I mean, having them hanging around doing homework all the evening like this?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Katharine evasively, picking up the iron again. “It’s not much different in the holidays when they’re hanging around doing something else. Or doing nothing—that’s the worst of all, don’t you think? When they have nothing to do.”

  “Well, of course, with Mavis and Jack that simply doesn’t arise,” said Stella, stretching out her long legs as smugly and luxuriously as a cat, but with much less dexterity: the ironing board lurched under Katharine’s hand and the kitchen table shuddered: “Mavis and Jack come home so full of interests and enthusiasms that they simply don’t know what boredom is.”

  “What sort of interests?” asked Katharine, with genuine curiosity, while she readjusted the toppling ironing board; “Things they do indoors, do you mean, like painting and Meccano and things, or do they go out a lot?”

  “Everything,” declared Stella with the emphatic vagueness which characterised most of her assertions about her children. “Every kind of interest you can think of.”

  Katharine quelled her impulse to meet this challenge by thinking of interests so outrageous as to force Stella to be more specific. Instead, she finished sending Clare to bed—odd how Clare’s dreamy obedience took up more time and energy, more nagging and pushing, than all Flora’s self-assertiveness or Jane’s mischief—and poured out two cups of coffee. Stella stretched again as she took her cup—but Katharine was prepared for it this time, with a firm grip on both iron and board. Soon they were deep in a discussion of the manifold advantages accruing from a coffee-grinder—which Stella had got too—as compared with the superfluousness of a cream-making machine, which only Katharine had got.

  Stella was just in the middle of explaining that real cream was quite cheap nowadays, and that anyway the top of the milk was just as good, also that ordinary milk was really nicer than cream anyway, and contained more protein, when Katharine heard a very small knock on the front door. Unfortunately, Stella hadn’t heard it, so after one or two vain attempts to interrupt, Katharine simply had to leave the room in the middle of hearing about the vitamin content of skim milk. She hurried across the hall just as the very small knock was being repeated a second—or perhaps even a third—time.

  It was Angela Prescott, in bedroom slippers and with a winter coat pulled on over her pyjamas. She looked white and rather wide-eyed against the background of rainy darkness, and at first she seemed to have some difficulty in explaining her errand.

  “Please—do you think——? That is, do you know where Mummy is?” she asked. “You see, I don’t know what to do. I think something’s happened.”

  CHAPTER III

  “COME IN, ANGELA,” said Katharine, reaching out to draw the child towards her. “Come into the warm and tell me what’s the matter.”

  But Angela shook her head. Shivering yet obstinate, she would not even come under the shelter of the doorway.

  “No,” she said. “No, I must go back. You see, I think something’s happened. I—I only wondered if you knew where Mummy was?”

  With sudden uneasiness. Katharine remembered her last sight of Mary Prescott that evening—creeping, dawdling, killing time under the street lamp so as not to reach home in time to encounter her husband. She remembered with compunction the gusto with which she had listened to Mary’s account of this latest quarrel with Alan—a quarrel which sounded just like all the others that Mary had related over the years. Or did it? Hadn’t there been something odd, and strained, in Mary’s manner? …

  Certainly Angela must not be allowed to go back alone to whatever was the mysterious trouble next door. Telling the child to wait for a moment, Katharine hurriedly returned to the kitchen, and explained to Stella briefly what had happened, and that she must go back with Angela at once.

  Stella’s face lit up. Other people’s troubles were like nourishment to her—something concentrated and quick-acting out of a jar. She would listen to no argument but that she must come too—“You might need my help,” she explained, with shining eyes.

  So it could not have been more than a minute or two before Katharine, Stella and Angela were all filing in through the Prescotts’ narrow hall, the facsimile of Katharine’s own, and into their living-room, which was cold and untidy, and looked as if no one had been in it all day.

  Once under her own roof, and in familiar surroundings, Angela became more communicative. Prompted by a good deal of questioning, she managed to give some sort of account of the situation that was troubling her.

  Her mother was out; that was the first thing; had been out all the evening. Not that this was so unusual, but her father was out too, and neither of then had told Angela anything about it, or had left any supper for her, or told her to go to bed at the usual time, or any of the things they usually did. They hadn’t even argued with each other about whether they should go out and leave her, which was apparently a familiar, and therefore comforting, prelude to t
heir outings. “There’s usually such a fuss, you see,” said Angela nostalgically. “About me, and about Mummy not being ready in time, and about the fires being on, or off, and about locking or not locking the back door. I can’t understand how they could have just gone, without any fuss at all.”

  No, she hadn’t seen either of them when she came in from school, though of course her father might have been in his study, she hadn’t looked. Auntie Pen had come to give her and Jane their tea, and No, she didn’t know if Auntie Pen had been asked to come—she hadn’t thought anything about it, and anyway Auntie Pen had seemed in a terrible hurry, she had gone away again while Angela and Jane were still eating. And then they’d been playing in the garden, and then Angela had been doing her homework, and it was only when it was bedtime, and there was no one anywhere, that she’d begun to worry.

  “So I packed my satchel and polished my shoes ready for tomorrow,” continued Angela. “And then I brushed my teeth and I went to bed. I hung up my dress, too,” she concluded, virtuously.

  Of course, reflected Katharine. That’s what a frightened child would be sure to do—to obey punctiliously, and all by herself, the rules that usually had to be enforced by constant nagging: the rules that hold together the threatened framework.

  “But you didn’t go to sleep?” prompted Katharine, and Angela agreed that she hadn’t. She’d lain in bed for a while, listening, and slowly coming to the conclusion that “something had happened.” So she’d got up and come next-door to Katharine. That was all. Angela finished her story and looked expectantly at Katharine, with a child’s supreme and arrogant confidence in the adult’s power—and duty—to explain, to reassure, to put matters right.

  Katharine quailed. Angela’s expectant gaze, combined with the total lack of data on which to base any sort of action, intimidated her. But Stella was made of sterner—or more inquisitive—stuff.

  “I think we should go all over the house,” she announced decisively and with relish. “You never know.”

  “They might have left a note or something,” hastily interpolated Katharine, anticipating that “you never know” might be invested by Angela with all sorts of unnerving implications. She wished she knew the child better, so that she might have some idea of the probable direction and extent of her imagination. She wished, too, that Angela could have been left out of the search; but Stella was already striding up the stairs (“We’ll start at the top—do the thing systematically”) with Angela close on her heels.

  The general aspect of the upstairs rooms was one of untidiness and neglect—bedclothes hastily pulled up, assorted garments draped over the chairs, dust filming all the furniture. Stella was as outspoken in her criticism as she dared to be in Angela’s hearing. Too outspoken, it seemed to Katharine; but then Katharine had often reflected that Stella would be a more amiable person if she had either fewer convictions or else less of the courage of them.

  “You’d never think, would you,” observed Stella “that Mary had nothing to do but run the house? No job—nothing! I wonder what she does with herself all day?”

  “She’s pretty busy, you know, really,” answered Katharine, rather repressively. It wasn’t true, of course, but she felt a good deal of sympathy for Mary’s ineffectual housekeeping. For who better than Katharine knew the demoralising effect of a quarrel with one’s husband? How it made one no longer care whether the carpets were swept or the furniture shining: whether the cushions looked better this way or that way, and whether books and papers were piled sideways on the shelves. Quarrelling could do more damage to the appearance of a house than a party for fifty people, all drunk. And the time it took, too! First the shouting, and the slamming doors: then the angry, secret crying … the not speaking to each other. And then the long, long brooding, going over and over what he’d said, and what you’d said, and what you should have said if only you’d thought of it in time. Yes, on second thoughts, Mary probably was a busy woman.

  Downstairs now, with Angela almost falling over their feet with her closeness, they searched first the living-room and then the kitchen, where the remains of the toast and honey tea were still littering the table. Katharine wished that Stella wouldn’t keep looking into cupboards and under tables. It was absurd, and surely full of frightening implications for Angela—although the child made no comment, and indeed peered into all these ridiculous corners with an avidity apparently as great as Stella’s own.

  It was in Alan’s study that they came upon the bloodstains: like red ink spilled across his desk, and like brown rust stains on the carpet beneath. For a moment Katharine stared at them quite without surprise, feeling, ridiculously, that this was just what she had expected to find all along. Her total lack of emotion made her glance nervously at Stella, as if seeking some clue as to how she ought to look, to behave, in a situation like this; she felt like an unaccustomed church-goer, surreptitiously watching for clues from his neighbours as to when to kneel, when to stand up, when to join in the singing.

  But Stella was staring at the desk just as helplessly as Katharine: her face, too, failed to show any appropriate emotion. If anything, she looked rather disapproving, as if this was just another example of Mary’s slatternly housekeeping, like the dust and unmade beds upstairs.

  And then, quite quickly, the shock began to lift, and Katharine felt astonishment flowing back into her like blood into a numbed limb. But still she could not feel horror. Once again, and even more strongly, she felt the total lack of data as a constricting force all round her, paralysing action. What could you do—what could you feel, if it came to that—when you had no idea what had happened? Ring the doctor? But there was no patient for him to come to. Ring the police? But to tell them what? And anyway, supposing Alan had simply cut himself accidentally? Katharine could imagine his cold fury at finding himself on the front page of the local paper as a result of police intervention. Besides, Mary was Katharine’s friend; and supposing … Katharine would not let herself finish this supposition, even in her own mind, but she knew very well it would all add up to not ringing the police. Not without seeing Mary first, anyway.

  But something must be done. They couldn’t just stand there staring at the bloodstains all night. They must fetch someone—ring someone. Who was this Auntie Pen person that Angela had been talking about? She must surely know something about Mary’s and Alan’s whereabouts since she had come in to see to Angela’s tea—had presumably been asked to do so. Was she on the phone? …

  It was only now, on turning to ask Angela about Auntie Pen, that Katharine realised that the child hadn’t followed them into this room at all. What a terribly lucky thing, considering how she had followed like a shadow in and out of all the other rooms. Motioning Stella to follow her, she walked out into the hall, carefully closing the study door behind her.

  “Angela!” she called; and after a moment’s pause the child came out of the kitchen, quite slowly, and licking her fingers. She must have been helping herself to the bread and honey still on the kitchen table.

  “Angela,” said Katharine—a little too brightly, perhaps, a little too reassuringly—and was it obvious that she was standing in such a way as to block the door of the study? “Angela—you know you told us your Auntie Pen was here at teatime. Do you know where she lives? Has she a telephone number?”

  Was it only Katharine’s anxious imagination, or was Angela looking a little guarded? But she answered quite readily.

  “Oh yes. It’s in the book. Can she come, do you think? I’d like her to come.”

  Quite absurdly reassured by this, and feeling that simply by wanting Auntie Pen to come, Angela had lifted an enormous load of responsibility from her, Katharine’s shoulders, Katharine went eagerly to the telephone. As she waited, listening to the ringing tone, she remembered that this Auntie Pen must be the “sort of grandmother person” referred to by Jane. Was she an old lady, then? Too old to be expected to help with a problem like this? Katharine’s doubt subsided at the warm briskness of the voice that
was now saying “Hullo?” Old or not, this would be a person who could cope.

  Auntie Pen said she would come at once. That is to say, it would take her three-quarters of an hour, and could Katharine stay with Angela until she arrived? She did not ask what had happened—very luckily, for with Angela hanging around like this Katharine did not see how she could have explained very much. Nor did Auntie Pen seem surprised to be thus summoned: indeed, Katharine could have fancied that she had been waiting for just such a phone call, all ready, and with suitcase packed.

  As soon as she heard that Auntie Pen was coming, Angela seemed to relax; to realise suddenly that she was very sleepy. Of her own accord she went back to bed, leaving Katharine and Stella downstairs.

  It seemed a very long time that Katharine and Stella were sitting in the Prescotts’ sitting-room waiting for the front-door bell to ring. Stella had lit the gas fire, but it was making little headway against the day-long coldness of the room; and, oddly, there seemed to be nothing to talk about. Both women were uneasily aware that the breath of possible tragedy had put Mary temporarily out of range of the light-hearted, catty gossip which usually formed the staple of their conversation—indeed the very cement of their friendship, Katharine sometimes ruefully admitted. It was no longer possible, with those unexplained bloodstains in the adjoining room, to discuss Mary’s inadequacies as wife or housekeeper; it was not even possible to remark on Angela’s rather odd and secretive demeanour throughout the proceedings. Normally, Stella loved to spot signs of insecurity in other people’s children; she brought to it all the enthusiasm and proselyting expertise of a keen gardener spotting greenfly on somebody else’s roses. Katharine could already see the beginning of frustration on Stella’s face; could hear it in the cracking of her joints as she moved her long limbs restlessly. Bother Mary, she was almost visibly thinking: Why must she get her wretched husband murdered or driven to suicide or something; now we shan’t be able to say anything nasty about either of them for weeks and weeks.