The Trouble-Makers Page 7

  Before Katharine could answer, her bus drew up beside them, and she stepped quickly on to it, Mary scrambling up beside her, careless of their destination. By great good luck, the top deck of the bus was empty, and they were able to settle themselves in precarious privacy on the front seat. At last Katharine was free to answer her friend’s question—and it seemed to her that the answer was simple and obvious, and that Mary must really know that it was.

  “Why did he make up the story? Why, to protect you, of course, Mary. He must have seen that the wound couldn’t possibly pass as an accident once a doctor had seen it, and he didn’t want you to be blamed. He probably realises, in his heart, that it was at least half his fault—that he provoked you past endurance. He’s probably just as sorry about it all as you are. He loves you, Mary—don’t you understand? He always has, in spite of the rows, and in spite of his sarcasm, and his reserve, and all the rest of it. He loves you—and this is the proof of it. You should be happy about it—to have him sticking up for you like this.”

  Mary’s answering silence seemed to throb to a rhythm of its own, cutting across the noisy rhythm of the bus, and filling Katharine with new uneasiness. She thought that perhaps Mary was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt at thus escaping scot-free from the consequences of her crime: for crime, of course, it was, no matter how much one might sympathise with her, and understand the provocation.

  “Of course,” Katharine went on, when Mary still did not speak, “if you’re having pangs of conscience about it and are pining to confess, I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. I don’t imagine anything very dreadful would happen to you in the circumstances, and with Alan himself taking your side and everything. But really, I would have thought you’d do better to leave well alone. Obviously it’s what Alan wants—and you have to think of Angela, too. Think how it would upset her to know the truth—and all the gossip she’d have to face at school, too. If it was me, I’d stifle my pangs of conscience and leave it all to blow over. I really would. Unless, of course, some unfortunate dark man with a raincoat really does get pulled in—but I’m sure it won’t happen. Alan couldn’t have hit on a vaguer description—deliberately, of course—and I’m sure he won’t encourage the police to investigate too enthusiastically. And there can’t actually be any clues incriminating a dark man, since there wasn’t one….”

  But Mary seemed scarcely to be listening at all. Katharine had the feeling that in spite of her damaging and apparently frank confession, Mary was still locked away with some secret fear of which Katharine still knew nothing, and on which all her eloquent reassurance had no bearing. She could do nothing more until Mary herself chose to break the silence.

  The bus drew up with a jerk as the lights went red, and Katharine stared out at the hoardings on the wall facing her. Ever afterwards she was to connect the picture of a gigantic, impossibly rosy little boy grinning down at a plate of sausages with the white, agonised face that Mary now turned towards her.

  “That would be all very well,” Mary almost whispered, low and harsh, “if he just told this story to everyone else. But he tells it to me too. It makes me wonder if I’m going mad or if he is. After he came round, you see, they let me go in to him; and when I saw him lying in that stiff, neat bed, looking so white and … and sort of young,—I suddenly felt terribly, dreadfully sorry. I ran to him crying, and I bent down and began kissing him, and telling him how sorry I was, and that I’d never meant to hurt him…. And do you know, Katharine, he just stared at me, sort of incredulously. ‘What do you mean?’ he said, pushing me away. ‘How do you mean, you’re sorry? It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t let the man in; you didn’t even see him. You didn’t know anything about it until I called out to you, and you came in and found me with my arm bleeding.’ He looked at me then, very straight, right into my eyes. ‘How could it be your fault?’ he said again.

  “Katharine, what am I to think? Does he really think it happened like that? Did he have some dream under the anaesthetic that has muddled him—made him forget what really happened? Or when he fainted? Can fainting make you forget things, like concussion is supposed to do? And if so, will he go on forgetting? Or is it all some awful, complicated, martyred sort of pretence, that he’s going to keep up for ever and ever? And what for—when he must know that I know?—And know that he knows I must know? Oh, Katharine, what shall I do?”

  “Hush,” warned Katharine, for Mary’s voice was rising, and any moment someone might come up the stairs. “He could have forgotten, I suppose, after a faint—I don’t know much about fainting. Or—Mary—are you sure he wasn’t saying all that just in case there were some nurses or someone within hearing? Just to stop you betraying yourself then and there? After all, a hospital’s not a very private place, is it?”

  Mary shook her head decidedly.

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t that. There weren’t any nurses for miles—or any other patients. He was in a sort of little side-room by himself. But anyway, I’ve talked to him since then—since we’ve been home, I mean, all alone in the house, and he still says the same—that a dark man in a raincoat attacked him and then ran away. I tried—well, I sort of tried—to tell him what really happened, but he shut me up in a dreadful, icy way, and told me I was being hysterical. Oh, Katharine, it was awful. I just had to give up and accept the raincoat man. He seemed satisfied then. In fact, he really began being very nice to me, in his stiff sort of way. But, Katharine, what does he think? How can I know what he is thinking? Can you imagine what it must be like, to spend the rest of your life with someone who knows that you tried to kill him? Who knows that you know that he knows, and yet neither of you must ever speak of it? To have him watching you—sitting at meals with you—going to bed with you—and to know that all the time he’s thinking: ‘She tried to kill me once.’”

  “But you didn’t try to kill him!” broke in Katharine vehemently. “You just hit out in anger—and there happened to be a knife in your hand. And even if—in some part of your mind—you knew that you were holding the knife, your subconscious still made very sure that you only hit him in a place where it couldn’t possibly kill him. You didn’t just miss a vital spot by accident. They say that nothing happens by accident; one’s subconscious is in charge all the time.”

  It might have been Stella speaking. Katharine was aware of an exhilarating sense of power in laying such sentiments, like gifts (and such inexpensive ones) in front of a suffering friend. It must be this feeling, many times repeated, that gave Stella her breezy, muscular look.

  Mary looked the gift horse in the mouth, and who could blame her.

  “I’m sure my subconscious meant me to stab him right through the heart,” she said sharply. “It was me, not my subconscious, who——”

  But Katharine silenced her with a violent nudge. The young couple trying to settle themselves and their parcels and their Corgi and their two-year-old baby and his iced lolly on the seat just behind probably hadn’t heard a word, of course; and anyway, Katharine reflected, snatches of talk heard on buses are always bizarre to the point of making one question one’s own sanity. Look at that old woman a couple of days ago, saying as she heaved herself off the bus: “And if it hadn’t been for them radiators I’d have had the lot of them landed on me, teeth and all.” And the apparently comprehending conductress had laughed amiably, and Katharine had been left to spend the rest of her journey wrestling with unimaginable narratives which could have led up to this sentence as their dénouement. Surely nothing she and Mary had said could have sounded, out of context, any more extraordinary than that? Of course it was all right. In brief undertones, she arranged to meet Mary for her short lunch hour at two o’clock; and then it was time to get off the bus. As she stood up, she felt Mary clutch her arm for a second, and something made her glance quickly at the laden couple behind them. She noted with brief, ridiculous shock that the husband was dark, and (in common with nearly every other man in London) he was wearing a raincoat.

  Katha
rine almost laughed aloud. How absurd to let a mere invention of Alan’s take a hold on her imagination like this! Followed by Mary, she hurried down the stairs and off the bus; and now she had to rush off to her office, leaving Mary to dawdle through a couple of hours’ brooding and shop-gazing before they met again at two o’clock.

  CHAPTER VIII

  DURING HER TWELVE months back at work Katharine had discovered, with a sort of uneasy relief, that she could type much better when she was worried, or tired, or preoccupied. It seemed that her fingers, like charwomen, could get on with their work much more efficiently if their mistress did not interfere; and so today she was able to ponder Mary’s problem with a clear conscience for a solid hour; and though this hour failed to produce any new or illuminating solution, it did produce three foolscap pages of accurate typing, including several columns of figures whose very existence took Katharine by surprise when she came to check them at the end.

  On the whole, it still seemed to her that Mary should leave well alone. In childhood one imagines that an unconfessed crime will weigh upon one’s soul for ever; and one of the pleasantest aspects of growing up is the discovery that this is simply not so; that a very few days of not being caught out, of no trouble having ensued, usually suffice to obliterate the whole thing from one’s memory.

  Surely this would be the best solution for Mary? Alan’s reaction, though startling—even bizarre—at first sight, nevertheless might be wise. If he and Mary could, by tacit agreement, talk and behave to each other exactly as if Mary had had nothing to do with his injury, then, within a few weeks, it would really be as if nothing had happened, and no scar would be left on their marriage.

  Still musing on these lines, Katharine handed over her copy, and took over telephone duties from Mr Craig’s secretary when that young lady sailed in scented splendour out to lunch, radiating from every glint of her nail varnish the superiority of smart young career girls in their twenties over the middle-aged part-timers, with roughened hands, and shopping baskets dumped beside their desks. Katharine’s task during the ensuing hour consisted less of answering the telephone than of deciphering the notes on odd scraps of paper by which Mr Craig intended to convey what he wished said to various possible callers. These notes suggested to Katharine that Mr Craig communicated with his secretary more by telepathy arbitrarily decorated with red ink than by the actual writing of any known language, so this part of her work demanded a good deal of inventiveness as well as concentration. It took her mind off Mary’s problems so completely that by the time they were due to meet, these problems already seemed a little remote—almost trivial, and already solved.

  Mary was sitting, hunched and pallid, at a solitary table in the corner of the cafeteria. In front of her was a cup of coffee—no, two cups of coffee—and a plate of cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, still untouched. Skin was forming on both cups of coffee, and it was a little touching, Katharine supposed, that Mary should first have fetched coffee for both of them, and should have then allowed her own cup to get cold in company with Katharine’s. After two hours in the bustling office atmosphere, Katharine had to make a conscious effort to recapture the doom-laden mood which was obviously still enveloping Mary.

  “How are you?” she said—rather pointlessly—as she settled herself at the table, facing Mary. And then, as a sudden thought struck her, she added: “How’s Alan? Is he all right, with you staying out all this time?”

  Mary looked a little peevish, as if childishly resenting the deflection on to Alan of any of the concern and attention which had hitherto been focussed on herself.

  “Oh, he’s all right,” she assured Katharine, rather perfunctorily. “Auntie Pen’s there. His sister, you know—the one you met last night. She said she’d do his lunch. She wants to talk to him, she said. Do you think—do you, Katharine?—that they’re talking about me?”

  Katharine could not help smiling at the naïve egotism of the words—though whether they were prompted by vanity or dread it was hard to tell.

  “Why should they be?” she essayed cautiously; and Mary clasped her hands in a schoolgirlish gesture of suspense.

  “Oh, I do hope they are!” she continued, as if Katharine had not spoken. “If only he’s telling her the truth—that it was me who stabbed him—than I shan’t mind so much if he goes on lying to me about it. So long as someone else knows, then it doesn’t seem quite so mad. Oh, I do hope he’s telling her!”

  Katharine did not know what to say. She remembered the decisive, challenging way in which Auntie Pen had declared last night that “It was an accident!”—defying anyone to query it. Should she tell Mary that it seemed to her likely that Auntie Pen had guessed the truth right from the start? But of course that wasn’t the point. Mary didn’t care what Auntie Pen knew—she only cared what Alan told her—what he in fact knew.

  “I’ve been wondering,” Mary went on, slightly at a tangent, “whether to tell Auntie Pen myself all about it, and get her to persuade Alan to—well—not to be like this about it. Should I, Katharine, do you think? Should I tell her?”

  Katharine was silent for a moment, pondering.

  “Well—she seems a kind person,” she ventured non-committally. “I’m sure she’d want to help you, but …”

  “But you think she disapproves of me?” flashed Mary; and Katharine was taken aback.

  “I don’t! I don’t think anything of the sort!” she retorted. “As a matter of fact, she was talking about you last night—to me and Stella, you know—and she spoke very kindly of you. I think she’s sorry for you—she knows that Alan’s difficult——”

  “Oh, I wish people wouldn’t keep telling me that Alan’s difficult!” cried Mary—a protest that, in the context of Mary’s own ceaseless complaints about her husband, seemed so gratuitously unreasonable that it left Katharine speechless.

  “It’s not fair to say he’s difficult!” persisted Mary bewilderingly. “It’s not fair! He’s strict, that’s all. Strict, and rather reserved—like lots of men. Isn’t he, Katharine?”

  Half-dazed by this totally unprovoked attack, Katharine still could not answer; and suddenly Mary’s whole face crumpled and dissolved into unrestrained, defenceless weeping.

  “I’m sorry, Katharine,” she sobbed “But it’s so awful when other people say something that suggests he’s not—not quite normal. I keep trying to persuade myself, you see, that he’s just a bit more pernicketty than other men—a bit more reserved. That there’s nothing special the matter … no more than lots of wives have to put up with….”

  Her words blurred and mingled with her tears in the depths of a great serviceable handkerchief as Mary tried to hide her tear-stained features. When she looked up, her face was under control again, her voice clear, even argumentative.

  “There’s one thing Auntie Pen definitely disapproves of about me,” she declared, as if scoring a point against Katharine, “and that’s having adopted Angela. It was my idea, you see. Alan was always rather against it—he said if we couldn’t have children then we couldn’t, and it was best to leave it at that. He was always very scrupulous about saying ‘we’, you know—‘we can’t have children’—although we both knew perfectly well that I was the one who couldn’t. I know it was very considerate of him to put it like that, but somehow it made me feel worse about it, not better. Can you understand that? Anyway, I persuaded him. I thought, you see, that if we had a baby—even an adopted one—it would somehow make things come right. I know they always say in the articles that you shouldn’t adopt a baby for that sort of reason, and Auntie Pen said so too, and of course she was quite right—and so were the articles. It seemed so unfair, somehow—so many against one, I mean. Auntie Pen, and Alan, and the articles all saying the same thing, all lined up against me. And now Angela as well. Did you know that Angela told me the other day that she thought we oughtn’t to have adopted her?”

  “No,” said Katharine, smiling. “But honestly, Mary, I wouldn’t take it too seriously. Children are always saying
things like that. Jane was saying a little while ago that she wished she was an adopted child, like Angela, because it would be so lovely if Flora wasn’t her real sister. They’d just been quarrelling about something, and Flora had got her own way, as usual. But you don’t want to take too much notice when kids talk like that. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means something with Angela,” said Mary sombrely. “You see, I can tell for myself that it hasn’t really worked out. I’m very fond of Angela, of course, and so is Alan—that is, he’s good to her, and treats her well. But it just hasn’t—jelled—if you know what I mean. I still feel that she’s a sort of visitor in the house. I suppose, really, the trouble was that she was too old. She was past three, you know, when we got her. She can sort of remember the orphanage—though I must say she seems to remember some very queer things about it. As if it was a sort of Paradise, you know, and it just wasn’t. It was rather a miserable place, actually, and smelt of disinfectant. And when I tell her all the things that you’re supposed to tell them—you know, that we actually chose her out of all the other babies, instead of just having to take what we got, like other parents—when I tell her that, she just says it’s not fair, and that she ought to have been allowed to choose us. What on earth can I say to that?”

  Katharine laughed.

  “Offer to play ping-pong with her, I should think,” she suggested, “or whatever it is she best likes doing with you at the moment. And don’t worry. I’m sure it’s quite natural that she should make up flamboyant fancies about the orphanage—in fact, I’ve heard her do it, and it strikes me as perfectly harmless—a sort of game. When she and Jane and Flora were sorting out their fireworks for next week, she was telling them some wonderful story about a catherine wheel they’d had at the orphanage that was twenty feet across and threw out red and purple sparks as high as a church. And then Flora spoilt it all by telling her that if she was only three she couldn’t possibly have known it was twenty feet across, because children of three can’t count up to twenty; and they spent the rest of the evening arguing about how far children of three can count. By the way, it is your turn to have the bonfire in your garden this year, isn’t it?”