The Trouble-Makers

by Celia Fremlin

  For Stephen was not looking in the least as Katharine had pictured him during that moment as she stood outside the door. If only he had been padding brusquely and clumsily about in his old brown dressing-gown, his hair still standing sleepily on end! It wouldn’t have mattered, then, even if he had looked a bit cross as he turned round. But instead, he was already dressed, neatly and completely, in his dark town suit; his hair was smartly smoothed down, and his face already wore the aloof, preoccupied, business-man look which went with these clothes. Not even the touching absurdity of a frilly apron had been allowed to soften the picture; instead he was protecting his suit with a tea towel tied round so stiff and straight as to seem almost to belong with the rest of the outfit. Briskly and irritably he was pitching knives and forks off the plates into the hot water, and stacking the plates themselves into an angry tower. He hardly glanced at Katharine as she stood in the doorway trying to replace the fading, useless smile in her lips. Perhaps, even now, if she ran across the room to him….

  “Why don’t we have a washing-up mop, like other people? Just look at this!”

  Stephen held up the tattered remnant of old towelling that Katharine had got so used to during its weeks of service that she had not noticed its advancing senility. It did look rather awful; but all the same, Stephen didn’t have to hold it out ostentatiously between his finger and thumb like that. He must have been using it without demur all the time until she came into the room; why had it suddenly become so repulsive now?

  “We have got a mop,” she countered defensively. “It’s——”

  But it wasn’t, of course. And then Katharine remembered that Jane must have taken it for cleaning her rabbit hutch. It was the only thing that would go right into the corners, Jane said; and though Katharine had told her that No, she mustn’t have it, she had known, even at the time, that she wasn’t saying it in the tone of voice which would actually prevent Jane taking it; and she knew that Jane knew that she knew that she wasn’t; so in a way you couldn’t really say that it was disobedience on Jane’s part at all.

  Though of course Stephen wouldn’t see it like that. He would say that it was disobedience, and that if there was any more of this sort of thing the rabbit would have to be got rid of; and Jane would cry, and then Clare would butt in with some tactless argument—tactless as only Clare could make it—in Jane’s defence; and then there would be a frightful row all through breakfast, and by that time Clare would be crying too, and that would make her forget her hockey boots, and she would miss her train coming back for them, and that would mean she would get into trouble for being late and would come home miserable about it, and then there would be another row about why is Clare always in trouble at school? …

  This vista of alternate tears and rows, without foreseeable end, seemed to Katharine at that moment to justify any kind of lie, black or white, that she could think of quickly enough.

  “I forgot; it was worn out and I meant to get a new one,” she improvised hastily, assuring herself by some blurred and devious reasoning that it wasn’t really a lie because she really was going to stop Jane using the mop for the rabbit hutch in future.

  “I can’t understand,” Stephen was saying, flicking cups upside down on to the draining board with an ostentatious efficiency far greater—it seemed to Katharine—than could possibly be needed for so simple a task; “I can’t understand why you don’t keep stocks of the things you need, like other women. This mop business is typical. You wait until your old one is worn out and thrown away before you think of buying another. It’s the same with everything in this house. There’s never any soap in the bathroom. The black shoe polish is——”

  “I bought a new tin yesterday,” snapped Katharine. “I just haven’t put it out on the shelf yet, that’s all. And as for the soap, there’s been exactly once, in the last six months, when——”

  She heard her own voice, rising shrill and shrewish, and stopped in disgust. There was some truth in his complaints, of course. She was careless about this sort of thing, and she might have admitted it handsomely if it hadn’t been for that infuriating “like other women”. What other women? On what grounds was he so certain that all other women were such models of housewifely efficiency? Let him ask some of the other husbands, that’s all! What a pity men didn’t gossip about their wives the way women did about their husbands, then they would soon learn that their own wife wasn’t the only one with shortcomings…. What were they really quarrelling about, anyway, she and Stephen? Was it really about soap, and shoe polish, and washing-up mops?

  “Didn’t you see my note last night?”

  She thrust the query without warning into the middle of their bickering, surprising even herself by its irrelevance. It was no wonder that Stephen stared at her stupidly for a moment.

  “Your note?” he repeated blankly.

  “Yes, I left you a note on the hall table, where I always do. Telling you where I was last night. You didn’t notice I wasn’t in bed, I suppose?”

  She wished she had left out this bitter little tailpiece, but it was too late now. Stephen looked at her wearily, with a quite uncalled-for air (it seemed to Katharine) of being nagged and henpecked.

  “Honestly, Katharine, I came in absolutely worn out at God knows what hour, and I staggered up to bed, and when I found you weren’t there, I dragged myself back as far as the top of the stairs, and saw that there was a note on the table, but I was too tired to bother to go down and read it.”

  Katharine felt as if she had been slapped. Her spirit tingled like smarting skin.

  “You were?” was all she could find to say in her anger and hurt.

  “I was. And anyway, I knew what it would say. What your notes always say: ‘Gone to Mary Prescott’s. Back in half an hour.’ Meaning you’ll be back in about four hours, as Mary’s had another frrrrightful row with her frrrrightful husband, and wouldn’t I like to hear all about it?”

  In spite of himself, Stephen’s voice was growing amused now, warm. In a moment Katharine too would have been laughing at the absolute rightness of his guess….

  “Mummy! Where’s my clean blouse?”

  But it wasn’t Flora’s shouting over the bannisters that destroyed the moment: it was Katharine’s shouting back. And yet what else could she do, with Flora’s breath already indrawn for another, more imperative “Mummy!”?

  “Hush, dear, don’t shout so! It’s in the——”

  Oh, bother! She hadn’t even ironed it yet; it was still damp and crushed up in the pile left when Angela interrupted her last night.

  “Wait a minute, Flora,” she yelled—a self-contradictory sort of yell, trying to be loud enough for Flora to hear from the upstairs landing, and yet soft enough for Stephen, right beside her, not to feel that it was interrupting their conversation. “I’ll bring it up in a minute,” she went on, desperately, and wondered if Flora knew as well as she did that it would be ten minutes at least. And it was already twenty past seven, and she hadn’t woken Clare yet—Glare, who would sleep till lunch time unless roused over and over again.

  “Wake Clare for me, will you, Flora,” she yelled once more, aware of Stephen’s stiffening irritation at the tumult; and switching on the iron, she set to work on the blouse.

  And then, like a film unwinding, everything began to happen exactly as Katharine had foretold. First, Clare came down to breakfast very late and very sleepy, carrying a pair of hockey boots so muddy that not even the kitchen floor could reasonably be expected to house them, and Katharine told her to put them outside the back door till after breakfast. In a sleep-walking sort of way, and mercifully without argument, Clare obeyed, and came back looking a little less stupefied.

  “Look, Mummy,” she announced amiably, “I’ve found the washing-up mop. It was on top of Curfew’s hutch.”

  She thrust the unwelcome object towards Katharine. Rabbitty sawdust dripped incriminatingly over floor and table, and Stephen looked up sharply.

  “I thought you said you’d throw
n it away?” he accused; and Katharine clutched the abominable thing almost protectively.

  “Yes——I meant——That is——” She stopped; for the mop looked horribly healthy in spite of the damp and the sawdust. New, and plump, and fluffy it was; no one in their senses would have thrown it away. However, Stephen was in the middle of some gloomily absorbing bit of the paper; he might even now have let the whole thing slide if only it hadn’t been for the awful lack of any instinct for self-preservation on the part of any of the children.

  “Oh, Mummy, I’m sorry!” gasped Jane disastrously. “I did mean to bring it back, and I did mean to wash it, like anything! I was going to wash it and wash it, so that there couldn’t be any germs! I’ll do it now if you like.”

  She jumped up, scraping her chair back noisily, snatched up the mop with a fresh shower of sawdust, and tripping over her satchel on the way, she plunged towards the sink. No father on earth, however deeply immersed in however apocalyptic a morning paper, could possibly fail to notice the commotion. Stephen looked up indignantly.

  “Have you been using that mop for the rabbit hutch again, Jane?” he asked. “I thought I heard Mummy telling you not to, days ago.”

  “No, well, you see, Daddy, it was only just for this once,” she explained eagerly. “You see, Curfew’s sawdust had got awfully wet, and there were all bits of bread in it—I wish people wouldn’t keep giving him bread, Curfew hates bread—and you see, as it’s Curfew’s birthday on Saturday——”

  If only, thought Katharine, watching helplessly from the wings, if only she wouldn’t keep bringing in the creature’s name so much. If only she would refer to him as “the rabbit”. For among the multifarious aspects of Jane’s rabbit that annoyed Stephen, this name “Curfew” was one of the most provocative. Indeed, Katharine herself had been rather taken aback at the time of the christening, and had asked Jane, rather doubtfully, but why?

  “Oh, Mummy,” Jane had replied, a little patronisingly. “He’s called after the Curfew in the poem, of course. Don’t you know it? ‘The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day’——?”

  She quoted the line solemnly, raptly. It was plain that she found it beautiful. But what on earth did she think it meant? Did she think that a curfew was some sort of small animal? And if so, what did she think “tolls” meant? And “knell”? What, in the name of sense and reason, could be the picture in her mind as she chanted the words in unison with her classmates in 2A? Katharine hadn’t quite liked to ask her point blank: it seemed a pity to disillusion her—especially when disillusion would involve a whole new fuss about what the rabbit was to be called, all over again. And anyway, it was all rather sweet, in a way….

  But when Katharine told him about it, Stephen hadn’t thought it was rather sweet at all. He simply thought that it showed how appallingly Jane was being taught in her primary school, and how appallingly inattentive she must be. He went on and on about it—how heedless and scatter-brained Jane was becoming (which was Katharine’s fault); and going on to how crazy the State educational system was (which you’d have thought was Katharine’s fault too, the way he glared at her). Luckily, his annoyance wasn’t sufficient to make him propose taking Jane away from her school—where, after all, she was very happy, and learned, by fits and starts, a surprising amount of quite complicated arithmetic: but it was sufficient to cause him an extra stab of irritation every time he heard the rabbit referred to by its ridiculous name. The rabbit and Jane’s educational deficiencies were now firmly and inextricably intertwined in his mind: and if only Jane could understand this—or no—understanding was too much to ask; if only she could have some sort of instinct about it, the way children were supposed to have…. If only, one way or another, she would stop saying it—“Curfew…. Curfew…. Curfew….” Couldn’t she see how it was all bound to end? …

  “… Any more of this sort of thing, and I’ll have the brute got rid of!”

  Fatalistically, Katharine waited for the rest of it. Jane in tears. “It’s not fair, Daddy! Oh, Daddy, you can’t…!” and now here was Clare plunging recklessly, ineptly, to the rescue, like a non-swimmer whose courage in plunging into the stormy sea is only equalled by his nuisance-value in having to be rescued himself.

  “Jane doesn’t mean it’s not fair that she should be punished,” explained Clare heavily. “She means it’s not fair to Curfew. I mean, it’s not his fault about the mop, is it? It’s not even his fault that Jane has him at all.”

  “Well—for God’s sake—! is it my fault, then?” exploded Stephen. “Wasn’t I against having the beastly creature right from the start? The damned animal has caused nothing but trouble ever since she had it! One fuss after another … day after day….”

  “He doesn’t! It’s not!” screamed Jane, beside herself with the injustice. “It’s you who causes all the fuss, Daddy, not Curfew! There’s never any fuss about Curfew when you’re not there!”

  This was so devastatingly true that for a second everyone was silenced. But of course Jane mustn’t be allowed to speak to her father like that.

  “Jane! Be quiet!” cried Katharine despairingly. “And you too, Clare,” she added, seeing her elder daughter already opening her mouth with her disastrous “But Daddy, Jane only meant …” “Be quiet, all of you!” Katharine continued scolding. “And go and get ready for school. Just look at the time!”

  And as she began to clear the abandoned breakfast table, Katharine found herself reflecting that not Eve, but Cassandra, should be counted the prototype of womankind. For wasn’t this the hardest part of a woman’s lot—to know in advance, and in every detail, the exact course of every family row, and yet to be unable to deflect it one milimetre from its preordained course?

  CHAPTER VI

  KATHARINE DIDN’T HAVE to be at her job till mid-day, and she had long ago worked out a timetable by which all the chores could be finished before she left the house at eleven-thirty. On an ordinary morning, that is to say, when nothing out of the way occurred to interrupt her. But it so happened that during the whole of the twelve months since she had begun working, there had never once been an ordinary morning in this sense. Not once; and Katharine was gradually coming to the conclusion that the sort of morning presupposed by the timetable simply didn’t exist in the housewife’s world. Take this week, for instance. On Monday the coal-man had rung up to say he was coming, and Katharine had had to clear the seaside spades out of the cellar; and the broken birdcage, and the sodden cardboard boxes, and the wet leaves and bits of paper. And then he hadn’t come. He hadn’t come on Tuesday either, but on Tuesday she had had to take Jane for her last polio injection, and take her on to school afterwards as she didn’t know the way from the clinic by herself. On Wednesday the coal-man did come, just after she had washed the kitchen floor, so that on Thursday the kitchen floor had to be washed again, and also the geraniums had to be potted and brought indoors in a hurry because the paper said it was going to be frosty. It hadn’t been frosty, in fact it had rained all day and all night, and they could just as well have been left till the week-end, but anyway, here was Friday, and she must—she simply must—pop in next-door and see how Mary was—whether she’d got home all right last night and everything. And hear the end of the story, too, she admitted to herself, as she dried her hands and took off her apron. The kitchen was finished, and she would only stay at Mary’s a few minutes, and do the bedrooms when she got back.

  There were already three other visitors sitting round Mary’s kitchen table when Katharine arrived, and Mary herself, looking a little withdrawn, was standing by the gas cooker refilling a large earthenware teapot. Evidently she accepted unquestioningly the unwritten law of the neighbourhood that the first duty of anyone in trouble or distress is to make endless pots of tea for the people who drop in to hear all about it.

  Katharine glanced quickly at her fellow guests. Stella was there of course; she sat leaning her elbows on the table and clasping her teacup in both hands, flamboyantly, somehow managing to give the
impression that it was a pint of beer. Beside her, like a bright well-chosen little accessory, sat Esmé, her niece—or was it cousin?—who lived on the top floor of Stella’s house. Esmé was small and blonde and recently married, and as she helped herself to three small spoonfuls of sugar she was glancing round a little nervously. As well she may, thought Katharine ruefully, among us skilled and seasoned gossips. And with Mrs Forsyth here, too, to ensure that the conversation should hinge largely on the shortcomings of the whole male sex, epitomised as they were in the otherwise insignificant person of the absent Mr Forsyth. Mrs Forsyth was already wearing that aggrieved yet curiously satisfied look of a woman modestly aware of the prestige conferred by the ownership of a husband with more faults and failings than any other in the whole neighbourhood; and as she stirred her tea with small, jabbing movements she was watching Mary with a sort of eager, prompting look, as if willing her to make some damaging disclosure about Alan which she, Mrs Forsyth, could then cap with one even more damaging about her Douglas.

  But Mary was just now absorbed in pouring Katharine a cup of tea, an in answering once again the questions that she must already have answered three times this morning. Yes, Alan was as well as could be expected. Yes, he was out of hospital already; he was upstairs in bed right now.

  “In bed?” Mrs Forsyth had evidently found the required opening. “In bed, with just a cut on his arm? You’d think a bandage, or a sling, or something, would be all that was necessary, and he could go about his work as usual. But men are all the same, aren’t they. The tiniest thing, and they take to their beds as if they were dying! Goodness, don’t I know! Last week-end Douglas had a cold. Just an ordinary cold in the head, like we all get, you know—but he was absolutely convinced that he’d got ’flu! Determined to have it, that’s what I say; it nearly drove me potty, having him drooping about trying to get me to make a fuss of him. All Sunday he went about with a thermometer in his mouth, like a baby with a dummy, trying to make it go up to 99. But it never did; I had to laugh, really!”