The Trouble-Makers

by Celia Fremlin

  But she wished the fierce old thing would look away, all the same. Did she know her by any unfortunate chance? That really would have been unforgivably rude—to have stared like that, fixedly, at someone you were supposed to know, and yet to have shown no signs of recognition.

  A slow, forward-moving impulse shimmered down the length of the queue, and like a great sleepy beast it stirred, heaved itself a few inches along the wet, shining pavement, and came to rest again, as if in relief. Katharine was glad to find, when her section of the queue had finally shuddered to a halt, that the brief upheaval had been sufficient to put an olive green (or was it scarlet?) umbrella between herself and the old woman. And anyway, she thought, reassuring herself, perhaps the old thing was just whiling away the time by sizing me up. Two can play at that game, after all. Wryly, Katharine began to wonder what conclusion the woman would have come to? Did she guess at once that Katharine was a busy, capable mother, working part-time to help with the family finances? Could she tell that Katharine was hurrying back now to her comfortable suburban home, to her husband, and her three little girls? Or—Katharine shivered a little, and clutched her scarf tighter against a draughty sputter of rain—can it be that there is already something in my face to show that Stephen and I are no longer happy together? Is there even now that unmistakable tightening round the mouth, that hooded look about the eyes that mark, like a brand, the discontented woman? Did that nosey old thing even imagine that she saw in Katharine’s face the frustrated, hungry look …?

  In sudden, idiotic defiance, Katharine wanted to turn round, to crane her head round the umbrella and scream at the old woman: You’re all wrong! I’m not frustrated! I have children … a husband…. We aren’t getting on too well at the moment, I know, but it’s only temporary. What you see in my face is only temporary, you silly old fool; only temporary, don’t you understand? …

  A sudden, purposeful surging forward of the queue brought Katharine, like the flotsam of a breaking wave, to the threshold of her bus; and a minute later she was wedged inside it, at the far end, trying with one hand both to steady herself and to extract the fare from her handbag, and with the other to deploy her bulging shopping basket in such a way as neither to annoy her neighbours, ladder her stockings, nor squash her pound and a half of tomatoes. Yet even in the midst of these preoccupations Katharine still found time to glance fearfully at the reflection in the darkened window behind the driver’s back. It was all right; with all imperfections dimmed by the dimness of the reflecting surface, she looked pleasant, quite young, even quite happy. Of course she did! That old woman was just a fool—a jealous old sour-puss, thought Katharine, happily savouring the total injustice of her unfounded imputations.

  When she got off the bus it was nearly closing time at the local shops, and she still had to buy bread. There had only been the sliced, wrapped bread at the supermarket where she had shopped in her lunch-hour, and Stephen hated wrapped bread. Funny, thought Katharine, as she lumbered with her heavy basket towards the bakers, that the growing coldness between herself and Stephen should have affected her in this way: should have created in her not indifference towards his wishes, but rather a nervous, almost obsessive anxiety to please him in as many trivial ways as possible. Did it mean that she still loved him really? Still cared that he should be happy—or at least that he should enjoy as many small happinesses as she could salvage for him from the wreckage of their relationship?

  It didn’t feel like love. It didn’t feel like caring. It felt more like being frightened, Katharine admitted to herself as she emerged from the warm, lighted shop, clutching the crusty loaf protectively under its paper wrapping lest it grow flabby in the damp autumn air.

  As she turned the corner into her own road, Katharine saw ahead of her a slim, neat figure, moving rather slowly under the lamplight, body almost primly erect, but head bent.

  Mary. Mary Prescott, her next-door neighbour. Katharine hurried to catch her up and fell into step—albeit very slow—beside her.

  “Hullo.” Mary greeted her in the weary, disillusioned voice which Katharine—with a horrid stab of self-dislike—suddenly realised that she had been hoping for. For it meant that Mary had been quarrelling with her husband again; and what despicable, reprehensible comfort there was in this for Katharine! Why is it that when a woman is getting on badly with her own husband, nothing cheers her so much as the knowledge that another woman is getting on even worse with hers? It ought to make me feel worse, Katharine reflected guiltily, but it just doesn’t. It makes me feel much, much better. This is really why I ran after her in the first place simply in the hope of hearing that she has had a perfectly frightful row with Alan!

  “You go on ahead if you’re in a hurry, Katharine,” Mary was saying tensely. “Don’t wait for me. I’m going slowly on purpose.”

  Katharine was in a hurry, of course. But even if she had been less ghoulishly eager to suck comfort for herself from Mary’s troubles, it would have been cruel to have ignored so blatant an appeal to her curiosity.

  “What is it, Mary?” she asked. “Have you …? I mean, is Alan …?”

  “He’s going out at six,” said Mary, her lips only opening the barest minimum to allow the words to escape “And I can’t—I won’t—go back to the house while he’s still there. If it wasn’t for Angela I’d face it—I really would. But it’s so bad for her to hear us quarrelling; and she’s getting to the age when you can’t hide it from her. Alan thinks he can. He thinks that if he talks to me in that quiet, dreadful voice, and doesn’t shout, then she won’t know anything about it. But of course she knows! She may be doing her homework at the top of the house, but that cold, restrained fury of Alan’s—it seeps up, Katharine! It does! Up the stairs. Up through the floorboards….”

  Something in her friend’s intensity disconcerted Katharine for a second. Hastily she tried to bring Mary back on to her usual plane of trivial nattering about Alan and his shortcomings.

  And it was not difficult. Soon Mary’s light, resentful voice was in full and familiar spate about her grievances: how Alan had been writing letters all yesterday evening, right up till bedtime, and then, if you please, had turned round and complained that she never talked to him in the evenings! Talked to him! And he knew as well as she did that if she had dared so much as to open her mouth while he was writing he’d have been furious and told her she was interrupting. If only he wasn’t so self-righteous when he was being unreasonable … so cold … so impervious to argument…. By the time their short walk was over, Katharine felt that her troubles with Stephen were the merest trifles in comparison—just superficial bickering, such as you might find in any marriage. And there were lamb chops and mushrooms in her basket, which could be cooked quickly, so that tonight at least there would be none of that sense of rush and strain which so often spoilt their evenings right from the start. Supper would be on time. Stephen would be pleased—and would show it, he wasn’t cold and undemonstrative, like Alan. Poor Mary!

  This invigorating Poor-Mary feeling lasted Katharine for just so long as it took her to find the key in her handbag and to open the front door. For as soon as she came into the hall she knew at once, and with deadly certainty, that Clare was crying over her homework again. Not that she could actually hear the familiar, maddening sniffings and gulpings—Clare’s room was upstairs, at the back of the house—but she knew it all simply by the air of modest righteousness, the exaggerated composure, with which her second daughter, Flora, came out into the hall to greet her. Her elder sister’s troubles always affected Flora like this. You couldn’t call it deliberate unkindness—indeed, Flora had very likely been trying to help Clare to the best of her ability. But all the same, she seemed—there was no other word for it—to thrive on Clare’s inadequacies. Why, she even looked taller whenever Clare was crying, Katharine noticed irritably as Flora reached up to kiss her.

  “Hullo, Mummy. You’re late, aren’t you? I’ve done all my homework except my practising, and I got A for biology. Mi
ss Faith showed it to the whole class. She said my diagram was the only one which …”

  “Splendid, darling. I’m so glad.” Katharine spoke rather perfunctorily. For it seemed to her—Oh, so unfairly!—that Flora wasn’t talking about her biology lesson at all. Instead, she was telling her that Clare was, at this very moment, crouched heavily over her books in her chilly, untidy bedroom; the fire not switched on, with no blotting paper or india-rubber to hand; and crying quietly, hopelessly, over her quadratic equations. Or was it Latin again? Those wretched gerunds and gerundives?

  “And, Mummy,” continued Flora, tossing her shining and unwontedly tidy pony-tail (the little wretch had even brushed her hair in celebration of her sister’s trials, thought Katharine ungratefully), “Mummy, I tried to light the sitting-room fire for you. But it’s gone out.”

  Katharine’s carefully laid fire. The dry wood—the paper—all would be gone; only the black, hopeless lumps of coal would be left; and the black, dead slivers of burnt paper would float out all over the carpet, gently tinkling, as soon as you disturbed them. More wood—and it would be damp this time—must be fetched from the shed.

  “Thank you, darling. Never mind.” Katharine hoped that she had kept the irritation out of her voice, for, after all, the child had been trying to help. It was hard on them to have to come back from school to an empty, fireless home. Hard on Stephen, too, to have to come home to a supper always late, a wife always preoccupied—and tonight, on top of everything else, to a daughter crying over her homework.

  It was this that was going to cause the row tonight, and for a moment Katharine stood very still in the middle of the hall, paralysed by the total conflict of her situation.

  For Stephen always said that she shouldn’t help Clare. “Doing her homework for her” was what he called it—deliberately provocative, Katharine felt, for he must surely know that she never actually did the homework; just explained it. And explained, and explained, and explained. That, of course, was probably the trouble—not that Stephen really disapproved on principle, as he claimed to do, but simply that he couldn’t stand spending his evening listening to his wife explaining about present participles, or square roots, or whatever. And what husband would like it, she asked herself, with a deliberate effort to put herself on Stephen’s side. Immediately she felt a familiar little stab of pleasure at finding she had managed to see something from Stephen’s point of view—followed by an equally familiar little stab of frustration at the fact that there was still nothing she could do about it. For Clare did need help—and needed it, as always, just when Stephen was expected home. One should either be a childless wife or else an unmarried mother, thought Katharine rebelliously as she set off up the stairs—and even in the midst of her anxieties, she found herself thinking how well this cynical observation would go down at one of those comforting Aren’t-Men-Awful sessions at the launderette or over the garden wall.

  CHAPTER II

  IT ENDED, OF COURSE, in Clare’s bringing her books down to the kitchen and spreading them about on the table where Katharine was chopping onions against time.

  “It’s a kind of verbal adjective, you see,” Katharine explained all over again, her eyes smarting with the onion smell. “‘To be known’—‘Knowable’—something like that. So it has to agree with the noun. It’s not a verb in the way ‘She knows’ is a verb.”

  “‘She doesn’t know,’ I’d say,” remarked Flora smugly from where she stood, homework all finished, drawing geometrical patterns in a scattering of spilt salt on the dresser. “Mummy, shall I do my practising before supper?”

  Katharine did a swift calculation. If there was to be a quarrel—and what with supper late and Clare crying over her gerundives there almost certainly would be—then Flora’s practising after supper might well be the last straw (“Why on earth can’t that child get her practising done earlier? Can’t we have any peace in this house, ever?”) On the other hand, if Flora was occupied at the piano, then she couldn’t also be irritating her father by asking questions, or arguing—unwittingly rubbing salt on the surface of a mind already raw and exposed from quarrelling with Katharine.

  Katharine felt real tears for a moment soothing away the stinging pain of the onion-tears. Real tears, and no time to indulge them, what with the chops to get on, and Clare wanting to know how a gerundive was different from a passive infinitive, and the potatoes already melting on the outside, yet hard as rocks in the middle—all this week’s batch had been like that—and Flora still leaning on the door waiting for her mother to say Yes or No about the practising, and now—ye Gods, it only wanted that!—now the telephone ringing.

  When Katharine put the receiver down and went back to the kitchen, she could only hope that her daughters did not notice the terrible relief that she could not keep from her voice.

  “That was Daddy,” she told them. “He says he’ll be very late, and not to wait supper for him. So leave your practising till afterwards, if you like, Flora—and Clare, you leave your Latin. I’ll have plenty of time to help you after supper.”

  She would, too; because now it didn’t matter about lighting the sitting-room fire, or cooking cabbage (no one but Stephen liked it), or making things look tidy and welcoming. It was like a sudden holiday—and all because her husband was being kept late at work. When—where in her marriage had she come to feel like this? When had Stephen’s homecoming changed from a pleasant climax to the day, and become an anxious deadline? When had her desire to make things happy and comfortable for him in the evenings changed to a compulsive feeling that she had got to make things happy and comfortable for him in the evenings? Was it since she had started working again, and was always rushed? Or had it come gradually over the years? …

  “Mummy!”

  Nine-year-old Jane this time, darting into the kitchen as quick and bright-eyed as a field-mouse, her straight-cut dark hair misted over with raindrops. “Mummy, me and Angela have been having such a super time! You know where the lamp shines over the wall at the bottom of their garden? Well, you can read by it! Did you know? So we took the little table out of Angela’s greenhouse, and——”

  “But darling, you’re soaking!” Katharine ran her hand over her daughter’s jersey. “You’ll have to change before supper. I’d forgotten you were at Angela’s. You had a nice time, did you? And was Angela’s mother there——?”

  Katharine cut short the seemingly innocent question. Always, always she must be on guard against pumping Jane for inside information about the Prescotts’ domestic troubles, for the temptation to do so was tremendous. This evening, for instance, she was dying to know if Mary Prescott had succeeded in dawdling home slowly enough to avoid seeing her husband; and if not, had there been a quarrel? Had they been shouting at each other, or going about in icy silence? Not being able to ask Jane all was like watching a long-awaited instalment of a serial story disappearing into the dustbin.

  But after all Jane very likely knew nothing about the Prescotts’ quarrels. Perhaps even Angela didn’t, in spite of everything that was said about children’s sensitiveness to atmosphere in the home. If children were really so sensitive, mused Katharine ruefully, then how was it that they invariably asked their father for complicated and time-consuming favours at exactly the moment when he had pinched his thumb in the car door, or was frantically searching for an urgently needed book? It often seemed to Katharine that the average child, healthily encased in a carapace of total selfishness, could walk unscathed through a domestic atmosphere that you could cut with a knife.

  “No. Yes. I didn’t see her.” Jane’s answer broke in on Katharine’s speculations. “A sort of grandmother person gave us tea,” she continued conversationally. “A much nicer tea than Mrs Prescott gives us. Toast, and real honey in a honeycomb! I wish we had a grandmother.”

  “I’ll put it on the grocery list next week,” promised Katharine absently. “The honeycomb, I mean, not the grandmother. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Now do run upstairs, dear, and take off
your wet things. I’m just dishing up.”

  By nine o’clock the two younger girls were in bed and only Clare was left—no longer crying, but looking pale and inky, and bedraggled, and only just starting on her French. She was still working at the kitchen table, and watching her, Katharine wondered, as she had often done before, whether to curse that triumphant day when Clare had scraped through the eleven-plus and won herself a place at the grammar school. The secondary modern would have presented other problems, of course—but wouldn’t they at least have been more cheerful ones? Wouldn’t it simply be more fun to have a thirteen-year-old that you had to scold for wearing lipsticks and high heels, rather than one like this, inky and sodden with crying, yet still refusing to give up; still bravely, mercilessly, trying to suck encouragement, information and moral support from one’s own jaded and depleted store? The pile of ironing to be done on her right—the pile of Clare’s difficulties to be solved on her left—and neither seeming to get any less, no matter how Katharine worked on them.

  And, of course, into the midst of this depressing scene it would be Stella, who must plunge, radiating, as usual, an air of having tramped miles across the moors to get here—actually she came from four doors up. So here she was, bursting uninvited through the back door, surging into the small kitchen, and flinging to Katharine a breezy greeting as from wider, nobler spaces, and leaving the scullery door open into the bargain. Katharine went to shut it, the wind whipping round her feet, and came back to invite her visitor to sit down.

  Stella, however, was already seated, her feet stretched out under the ironing board, her eyes greedily fastened on Clare’s French grammar. Katharine knew that look. Ever since Stella had sent her own children to a progressive boarding school, snatching them from under the very jaws of the eleven-plus (just in time to save them from failing, said the neighbours, and just in time to save them from the grammar school treadmill said Stella), she had been bubbling over with self-satisfied condemnation of what she now referred to as the educational rat-race. Since Katharine well knew that this tirade could be triggered off by the mere sight of a tattered geography book on a chair, she waited in trepidation to see what would be the effect of the present scene. The whole thing might have been laid on for Stella’s especial delectation—the slouching, heavy-eyed grammar school girl, the inky books, the lateness of the hour…. In an attempt to avert the armoury of barbed condolences which were about to descend on the unsuspecting Clare, Katharine resorted to swift diversionary tactics, such as offering her visitor coffee, noisily filling the kettle for same, and then asking loudly and enthusiastically after Jack and Mavis in their co-educational paradise.