The Trouble-Makers

by Celia Fremlin

  It was a fine night; and yet the wetness of November was everywhere; squelching up from the ground, hanging still and heavy from every twig, not dripping in the windless air but sodden, all-pervading. Even the ashes of the dying bonfire were growing damp already; Katharine could hear them stirring and shuffling unhappily in the encroaching wet. From below, from above, from every side, the wetness was winning, coming back into its own.

  A sound of heavy movement nearby made Katharine start; and there, pushing down the dripping, overhung path beside the lawn came Mrs Quentin. Had she just come from the lighted house, of had she, too, been hanging about in the peaceful darkness? Katharine hadn’t heard the side door open, but then she hadn’t been listening for it. Mrs Quentin came close, breathing heavily.

  “Come over to the wall, could you please, for a moment?” she asked, in an undertone: an unnecessary precaution, surely, except as a mark of deference to the huge autumnal night. “That wall down at the end where the lamp shines over.”

  The Prescotts’ house stood on the corner, a wide residential road running past their wall on the side away from Katharine’s house. That must be the corner in which Jane and Angela had so joyfully discovered that they could read by the light of the street lamp, mused Katharine; and—yes—here was the little table from the greenhouse still standing where they had dragged it, and two rickety chairs as well. Heavily, but with surprising sureness, Mrs Quentin climbed on to one of them, and peered over the wall into the street.

  “There!” she whispered triumphantly over her shoulder “That’s where I saw him—under that lamp there.” She spoke aggressively, as though clinching a long-standing argument between herself and Katharine. Just as if Katharine had been going on and on for days trying to prove that there hadn’t been a man there.

  Katharine was annoyed. She hadn’t questioned Mrs Quentin’s story and anyway what was it to her whether it was true or not? Why make such an issue of it, when the whole thing was over and done with? Nevertheless, she climbed up on to the other chair and leaned precariously over, staring obediently down at the undistinguished blur of wet pavement indicated by her companion.

  “That’s where he was standing,” Mrs Quentin insisted, as if Katharine was even now denying it. “Just there by the lamp-post—standing as if he was waiting for a bus, only of course there aren’t any buses down this road, are there? I’ve been telling Mary about it, and she says——”

  A slight sound behind them made both women jerk round, clutching the wall for balance as the chairs lurched in sympathetic shock. Angela, pale and shiny-eyed, in a dark jersey and jeans, stood dimly silhouetted behind them on the wet path.

  “I saw him too,” she announced—had she heard the whole conversation, then?—“Standing under the light just like you said, Auntie Pen. Wearing a raincoat. And he kept looking at his watch—I suppose to see if it was time!” Her eyes grew rounder, more brilliant; her stance more self-important as she went on: “And then he began to walk away—slowly. I’ll show you exactly where he was, if you like——”

  Effortlessly, Angela skidded up the six-foot wall and seated herself astride it, apparently all in one movement, with that total communion between a child and its own home wall that goes beyond mere gymnastic skill, and seems more like a sort of symbiosis between the two.

  Now Angela, from her point of vantage, stared gleefully down at the pavement.

  “He was carrying a small dark bag,” she continued “Well—fairly small, sort of narrow, you know; and every now and then he looked in it—to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. I saw something shiny there, and of course it must have been the knife. He put his hand in and ran his fingers along the edge once or twice, seeing if it was sharp enough, I suppose….”

  Was Angela making all this up as she went along, or had she got it out of a comic? Or was she, perhaps, even believing it? …

  “He was muttering to himself,” proceeded Angela fluently. “Queer words that I couldn’t understand. Not French, or German, or Italian, or any proper language, but something very, very queer. And he kept making faces to himself, showing his teeth in a dreadful grin. They were long yellow teeth, like fangs….”

  Katharine began to feel that this had gone quite far enough, especially as Jane would certainly be regaled with the same story, even further embellished, within the next twenty-four hours.

  “Don’t be silly, Angela,” she said briskly. “You’re making it all up. If you’d seen anyone half as queer as that you’d have been terrified. You’d have rushed in and told somebody.”

  “I didn’t want to frighten Jane,” explained Angela virtuously. “She was here that evening, you know, and she’s younger than I am. She gets frightened very easily, you know,” she went on, patronisingly. “I’m not frightened of anything!”

  Having flung this fearful challenge into the vastness of the autumn night, Angela slid swiftly off the wall again and darted back into the lighted house. Katharine gazed after her.

  “We shouldn’t have talked so loud,” she said reproachfully. “Now she’s got all sorts of nonsensical ideas into her head.”

  “Children should have nonsensical ideas in their heads,” retorted Mrs Quentin, clambering down from her perch and feeling with her solid, lace-up shoe for a safe footing in the treacherous dark flower bed. “Man can’t live by truth alone, you know, and children even less so. You should know this—a mother of three!”

  “Yes—I know what you mean,” laughed Katharine. “And I wasn’t thinking of Angela coming to any harm. I think this business of keeping unsuitable topics from children is more a matter of expediency than for their sake. I mean, take this business tonight, for instance. Angela will go straight off and tell Jane all this rigmarole, and then they’ll both tell all their friends at school, piling up the horror as they go; and then the friends will tell their mothers——”

  “And why not?” demanded Mrs Quentin, picking her way along the muddy path in front of Katharine. “Why not? All those people passing on to each other more and more colourful lies, brighter and brighter, in the ever-widening, brightening spiral. Can’t you see it as an enrichment of life—of all their lives? Isn’t that how you do see it?” She threw the last words over her shoulder like missiles, carelessly aimed in the darkness, and Katharine was silenced. Was Mrs Quentin being sarcastic? Or perhaps—it occurred to her—Mrs Quentin actually wanted this rumour to be spread as widely as possible, simply to distract people from guessing the truth. Probably she had started the rumour herself, on purpose. Yes: studying the sturdy figure in front of her, picking its way heavily and skilfully through the overgrown garden in the darkness, Katharine realised that Mrs Quentin would certainly be capable of it. For a cause she felt to be worth while, this woman would certainly be prepared to start rumours, tell lies, back up false witnesses, without the faintest qualm of conscience. For that very reason, she probably told lies very well.

  Though, come to think of it, she hadn’t told this evening’s lies very well. In fact, they had been rather unconvincing. So perhaps they were just simply true. Perhaps, by coincidence, there really had been a man loitering under the lamp on the night when Mary stabbed her husband?

  Well, and what of it? Either the tale was true, and a mere coincidence, or else it was false, and a tribute to Auntie Pen’s loyalty to her brother’s family. Either way there was no harm done. The whole thing was trivial, and a bit silly.

  Why, then, should Katharine feel that some irrevocable decision had been reached that night. That under a quiet November darkness, lit here and there by a flashing, fading firework, something had been set in motion which none of them now could reverse, no matter which of them might wish to do so, nor how soon.

  CHAPTER XIII

  KATHARINE STUFFED THE shirts and the towels and the pillowcases into the great gaping mouth of the washing machine, slammed the door, and sat back on the nearest of the row of chairs to watch the revolving garments in stupefied fascination.

  The launderette
was fairly empty at this time in the morning, and where she sat Katharine had no immediate neighbours, but all the same she did not dare take her eyes off her machine until the red light had gone on. It was not that the red light was such a very peremptory signal; after all, it stayed on for two or three minutes, during any of which time you could quite well put in the greyish crystals labelled “First Wash”. But Katharine knew by experience that if you didn’t leap to it the very moment the light flicked on, then some public-spirited benefactor (or some self-righteous busy-body, according to how you felt) would lean towards you and hiss urgently, smugly, and absolutely incontrovertibly: “Your light’s on, dear.”

  Funny, really, that it was so annoying, because it was very harmless, and very well-meant; and after all, you really might not have noticed the light in time. But it was like having a door held open for you by your predecessor in a corridor when you are still a good many yards away. Having put you to the trouble of hurrying so as not to keep her waiting, your benefactor is now entitled to your gratitude.

  It was mean to feel like that, thought Katharine, as she sat there feeling like it, and watching nervously for her light. She fancied that the Light Brigade (as she called them in her imagination) were already on the watch—sharp-eyed, alert, every muscle at the ready, determined to say, “Your light’s on, dear,” quicker than she could leap to her feet; like some awful game of Snap. Once that was over, the red light safely on and off again, then Katharine could settle down to the real happiness of these weekly visits to the launderette: namely, reading a book, solidly, for twenty minutes, without feeling that she ought to be doing something else.

  “Hullo, my dear! Fancy you being here so early.”

  Mrs Forsyth’s voice came from behind a mound of coloured blankets which she clutched precariously against her. Katharine had to lean over sideways to get a glimpse of a face to which to address her reply.

  “I always come early,” she answered, from this awkward angle. “I have to be at work by midday, and anyway, it’s always much less crowded at this time, don’t you find?”

  Mrs Forsyth dumped her load on a chair—or rather on three chairs—with an ostentatious sigh of exhaustion.

  “I left His Lordship still in bed,” she commented, in oblique reference to the aforesaid sigh. “Reading the papers and drinking his fourth cup of tea! ‘Goodbye, breadwinner!’ I said to him. ‘I’ve got to go and do some work!’ Do you know, he doesn’t leave the house till nearly ten these days—and quite often he’s back by teatime! It makes me laugh, when he flops into an armchair as if he’d been heaving coal all day and was enjoying a well-earned rest. Well-earned rest, my foot!—he’s been resting all day; I know that for a fact. He spends all his time at the office gossiping and drinking tea—I know one of the girls there, and she tells me. And then he expects me to wait on him!”

  “And do you?” Katharine was aware of the familiar feeling of comfort, of self-satisfaction, even a sort of low-grade self-respect, which she always felt on hearing another wife complaining of another husband. She, Katharine, would of course never stoop to such treacherous revelations about Stephen—fancy gossiping about his shortcomings with a girl from his office, as Mrs Forsyth must have done. Katharine herself would never be so disloyal, but all the same it was tremendously satisfying to encourage Mrs Forsyth’s disloyalty.

  “And do you wait on him?” she prompted eagerly; and Mrs Forsyth’s self-pity boiled up like a pan of milk.

  “Wait on him! It’s not the word for it! Who brought him four cups of tea in bed this morning, as well as cleaning out the grate and washing the breakfast things? It gets me down sometimes, it really does. Do you know, he was home by ten minutes past four yesterday; and so when he did his tired breadwinner act, flopping into the armchair and gasping for a cup of tea, I simply glanced at the clock and said: ‘What a shame, they have kept you late, you must be worn out!’ I meant to be sarcastic, of course, but believe it or not, he took it seriously—he absolutely lapped it up! You should have seen how he smirked as he said yes, well, I am a bit exhausted, and blah blah blah about some chap called Cooters or something. All Douglas’s clients seem to have the most ridiculous names, like something out of comic opera. The last one——”

  “Your light’s on, dear.”

  “Oh, Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  Katharine got the words out somehow, hoping that they conveyed appropriate and insincere gratitude rather than inappropriate and sincere hatred, and jumped to her feet. By the time she had scooped the crystals into their steaming destination and come back to her place, Mrs Forsyth had gathered up her blankets and gone to weigh them. She came back with a look of such truculent malice on her face as seemed to Katharine disproportionate to anything that could possibly have happened in this humdrum setting.

  “How much would you think these weigh?”

  The truculent look was straining itself round the pile of blankets to get a good view of Katharine’s response; and Katharine imagined that the blankets must weigh either very much more or very much less than one would suppose. But since she didn’t know which it was, Katharine was at a loss as to how to guess so as to give her companion maximum satisfaction. Safest, really, to say exactly what she did think.

  “Just about the nine pounds, I should say,” she hazarded. “I should think you’ll just get them into one machine.”

  Mrs Forsyth was enchanted.

  “That’s right! Exactly nine pounds! Nine pounds to the ounce! Do you know, Douglas was saying it would be more than that! He said it would be at least twelve pounds, and I’d need a second machine. I told him I wouldn’t, and I was right! Exactly nine pounds!”

  The jubilation in her face would have suggested to a stranger that Mrs Forsyth had just won a football pool rather than merely the prospect of telling her husband at ten past four that afternoon that he had been wrong about something. Katharine watched her pushing her blankets—her faithful vindicators—lovingly into their single machine, and slamming the door with joyous finality. They began slowly to revolve, gathering speed until they became a gorgeous whirl of rainbow colour, quite inappropriate, Katharine reflected vaguely, to Mrs Forsyth’s spiteful and ungenerous nature. You’d be reading articles about it soon—how you could tell people’s character just by looking at the contents of their washing machines. It used to be just by looking at their shoes, or their window curtains. And people’s characters stayed just as complicated as ever—just look at Katharine’s own wheeling medley of off-whites, right next to all this peacock glory.

  Katharine picked up the local paper, which had been left on a chair nearby. She would much rather have read her book, but Mrs Forsyth was going to come back and sit beside her at any moment, and for some reason it always seems much ruder to read a book in company than to read a paper. The paper was folded back to the advertisement page, and Katharine, not being in need of a studio flat, or a second-hand grand piano, or an expert landscape gardener, readjusted it to begin at the beginning. As the front page came unwillingly into view under her flailing arms, she experienced a sudden shock.

  “MAN STABBED IN CAFÉ”, read the headline—and really, it was absurd to have been shocked, because of course Alan hadn’t been stabbed in a café. All the same, reading of stabbing at all was oddly unnerving…. Police seeking information … description of assailant … all the rest of it. Katharine became aware that a stout, middle-aged woman on the seat behind her was breathing interestedly over her shoulder.

  “Awful, innit?” commented the owner of breath cheerfully. “Just round the corner from us, it was. Not five minutes away. Awful, innit?”

  Katharine agreed noncommittally; and her companion went on: “Not safe, are you, not anywhere, these days, not after dark. I’m always telling my daughter, I tell her——”

  But what the good woman always told her daughter, and with what (if any) effect on the young lady’s leisure activities, would never be known, for just then Mrs Forsyth came back and settled herself once
more next to Katharine, craning over at the paper, and beginning to talk immediately.

  “Funny, isn’t it, two stabbings in one week. Though of course the Prescott one isn’t in the paper … is it? Is it? …”

  She moved as if to take the paper right away from Katharine but Katharine hung on to it—why, she was not quite sure.

  “No, of course it isn’t,” she said decisively, and without looking. She tried to turn the page, but Mrs Forsyth put out her hand and arrested the movement. Evidently she wanted this page left uppermost—not to read, as it transpired, but as a sort of introduction to the subject uppermost in her mind.

  “I suppose you’ve heard?” she murmured to Katharine, very softly. “You’ve heard that they think they know who it was?”

  “Who what was?” Katharine was startled. “Do you mean…?”

  “Who stabbed Alan Prescott, of course.” Mrs Forsyth continued, rather less cautiously. “The man who broke in and stabbed him. They’ve an idea who it was.”

  Katharine was dazed, and somehow frightened. She felt, quite illogically, that Mary’s secret was somehow being attacked, though in fact, of course, the exact opposite was happening.

  “They haven’t actually mentioned any names yet,” Mrs Forsyth was saying happily. “But they have reason to believe that it was a local man—someone who knew Alan well. It’s just what I was saying, isn’t it? Do you remember my saying that? …”

  Yes, of course Katharine remembered; but she also knew that hypothesis was totally untrue.

  “It’s all nonsense,” she asserted loudly. “I know it is. They can’t have found it was a local man, because——”

  She stopped in time. Surprising how difficult it was—and how annoying, too—to keep a secret in the face of this sort of provocation: when you knew that with a single forbidden sentence you could wipe the whole of that smug, patronising smile off Mrs Forsyth’s face.