The Trouble-Makers

by Celia Fremlin

  Katharine bent over her pile, and began fingering it through distastefully, like a reluctant buyer at a jumble sale.

  “Just look—this is the sort of thing, I mean. A winter coat with the sleeve lining torn. Another with the tab off. Jane’s satchel with the strap broken. Flora’s jeans wanting a new zip. The loose cover of the armchair with half its tapes off. I do envy those women in books whose mending always seems to consist just of darning socks, don’t you? Why, they can keep it in a mending basket! I’d need a van to keep mine in. Of course, our whole house is a sort of glorified mending-basket-cum-washing-box when you come to think of it….”

  Katharine had been chattering on, hoping to bring the smile back to her friend’s face. But Mary seemed not even to be listening. She was fidgeting about the room, restlessly, in a semblance of tidying, and now she had moved over to the window, latching it, testing the firmness of the latch, and then just standing there, staring out into the darkness. The long, heavy curtain had fallen back over her slight figure, and all Katharine could see of her was a beautifully shod foot, tapping uneasily. The curtain twitched a little as Mary’s shoulders moved behind it—perhaps in a shrug, perhaps in some less definable restlessness.

  Mary remained behind the curtain so long that Katharine grew puzzled. She went over to join her.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked casually, pulling the curtain a little to one side. She was quite unprepared for the startled terror with which Mary whirled round to face her.

  “Oh! How you startled me!” cried Mary—unreasonably, it seemed to Katharine, for surely she must have remembered that Katharine was in the room? “Oh—you gave me such a fright!”

  “Who on earth did you think I was?” laughed Katharine. “And what are you looking at, anyway? Are the neighbours dancing naked in the garden, or something?”

  Standing beside Mary, cut off by the curtains from the lighted room behind them, she, too, stared out at the dark gardens—Mary’s, her own, and then the Pococks’, with its eternal line of washing, forever renewed and yet for ever the same, like the tissues of the body. A little while back someone had tried to get Katharine to sign a petition about getting the Pococks to take their washing in on Sundays, but Katharine had refused. She felt that by now it would be like asking them to take in their lawn, or their toolshed, or any other permanent feature of their garden. Anyway, once neighbours got into the habit of signing petitions there was no knowing where it would stop. Before you knew where you were there would be petitions about people keeping rabbits in ramshackle hutches in the back garden, or letting their children practise the piano at all hours of the week-end.

  Anyway, the Pococks’ washing looked very nearly beautiful just now as it billowed white and ghostlike in the gusty November darkness; and beyond it the houses and the small bare trees faded into a medley of dark and darker angles and smudges.

  She could see nothing that could have riveted Mary’s attention for all this time; and indeed Mary herself confirmed this.

  “I’m not looking at anything,” she declared, a little sulkily, and swished back through the curtains into the lighted room. “I’ve got to go now,” she went on, suddenly quite bright and practical. “Will you be all right, Katharine? Angela’s upstairs, finishing her homework, and then she’ll go straight to bed. You needn’t bother about her at all, so long as you’ll just be here. And help yourself to anything you like to eat or drink, of course, won’t you? There isn’t anything much, actually, I somehow couldn’t get around to doing any shopping today….” She moved hesitantly towards the door, and stopped again.

  “I must go,” she repeated, as if somehow Katharine was detaining her; and then: “I must just go and make sure I’ve bolted the back door.”

  Katharine followed her through the kitchen and into the scullery, and it turned out that she had bolted the back door. And locked it, too, and put up the chain. But Mary examined her handiwork a little sceptically, pressed the bolt home more securely, and then latched the tiny window that looked out on to the dustbins. Then she stood staring at the refrigerator as if she wanted to lock that too; as if she suspected that it concealed a trap-door to a secret passage under the road.

  “I think there are some cold sausages left,” was the conclusion of her anxious scrutiny; and Katharine laughed, and hastened to assure her that she had already had a meal.

  But Mary still hung about in the scullery, intent and very still, as if waiting for something. Under the glare of the white, unshaded bulb she looked strained and almost ill, despite her sparkling eardrops and the sequin-spangled black jersey she was wearing.

  The refrigerator jerked into its periodic bout of humming, and this seemed to rouse Mary. She moved back into the hall.

  “Well, goodbye, Katharine,” she said, in her normal voice. “And thank you most awfully. We’ll try not to be late.” And then, silencing Katharine’s assurances that she didn’t mind how late they were, she added: “Bolt the front door after I’m outside, won’t you, Katharine? And don’t let anyone in. Just take no notice if anyone knocks.”

  Katharine was startled.

  “Why ever not?” she asked. “I’m not Angela, you know—I’m not a child!”

  “No. But you’re alone in the house with a child,” said Mary. “And you heard—didn’t you?—that Angela saw a man with a raincoat hanging around the house this evening?”

  “Yes—but for Heaven’s sake—— After all, we both know——”

  “Hush!”

  Mary’s voice was not merely peremptory; it had a wild despairing quality, as if it had been forced out from some baffling depth of agony. “Hush, Katharine, please!”

  Katharine realised, with some confusion, that she must have been talking rather loud, and she glanced up the stairs, expecting to see Angela leaning zestfully over the banisters, as Flora would undoubtedly have been doing in a similar situation. But there was no sign of her; and anyway, Katharine hadn’t said anything incriminating, had she? She hadn’t even been going to finish the sentence which Mary had interrupted with such unnecessary urgency.

  And now Mary had gone, tap-tapping off into the darkness to meet the husband she was afraid of. Or hated? Or was trying to get on better with? Katharine shrugged off the problem, closed the door and bolted it, according to her instructions, and went back to the living-room.

  For a few minutes she sat idly on the sofa, looking through a magazine. There was more than enough time for the mending in the four hours or so before the Prescotts could be back, and it was so restful to sit in someone else’s house doing absolutely nothing. You could never do this at home; there was always something, somewhere, nagging at your conscience,—usually in full view, too, no matter where you sat. Curtains that needed washing if you faced the window; a grate that needed black-leading if you faced the fire: books that needed sorting and dusting if you faced the wall: the threadbare piece of carpet that needed patching if you faced the door. But here nothing mattered at all. Indeed, the blemishes in someone else’s home can be a positive delight to a jaded housewife’s eye. The black smudge on the wallpaper that you don’t have to rub at with breadcrumbs; the vase of wilting flowers that you don’t have to give fresh water to; the dust in the carved table legs that you don’t have to poke at with a duster wrapped round a stick. Bliss! thought Katharine, looking ecstatically round at each of these flaws in turn: such peace and quiet as she had not experienced for months! And it was only after several minutes of revelling in it that Katharine began to feel that the quietness was too complete.

  What was Angela doing? Homework, Mary had said; but surely homework wasn’t done in such total silence as this? Most certainly it wasn’t in Katharine’s own home. True, with an only child one wouldn’t expect arguments about ink, and taking too much room at the table, and who had borrowed whose protractor; but all the same, there should be some sound from upstairs, surely? The shutting of a book—the dropping of a pencil. Or had Angela already gone to bed?

  Reclinin
g at ease on the sofa, Katharine worried about it a little, but not enough to make her shatter this enchanted idleness by actually getting off the sofa and going to look. Give it another ten minutes, she thought drowsily. If by then there had been absolutely no sound….

  *

  Katharine woke with a start, and with the feeling that she had been asleep for a very long time. She started up, and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece.

  A quarter past three! Had she been drugged, or something? And why weren’t Mary and Alan home long ago? But almost coincidently with the dismay of this discovery, Katharine recovered full consciousness and remembered about the clock—Mary’s idiotic clock which always said a quarter past three. They couldn’t get a new one, Mary had once explained, because she particularly wanted a chiming clock that would ring out delightfully every quarter of an hour, and Alan particularly wanted an electric clock that wouldn’t. So they had compromised by not having a clock at all. Sad, Katharine remembered reflecting at the time, that so many compromises in marriage are of this empty and destructive kind.

  So whatever the time was, it wasn’t a quarter past three. It must be late, all the same; it felt late, somehow. Half past eleven, perhaps? Even twelve? Mary and Alan would be back any moment now, and Katharine was guiltily aware that she hadn’t looked after Angela in the least. She hadn’t even seen the child. And what about that strange silence at the beginning of the evening—almost as if Angela hadn’t been in the house at all?

  In sudden panic, Katharine scrambled off the sofa and hurried out of the room. Of course, when she got upstairs she would find Angela in bed and asleep; but all the same she must reassure herself about it. How absurd to have let her half-waking imagination run riot about a dark man in a raincoat kidnapping the child, when the dark man in the raincoat didn’t even exist! How suggestible could one get?

  Angela’s bed was empty. But somehow the shock of this discovery was less than the shock of finding, a fraction of a second later, that the reason for its emptiness was simply that Angela was still up. Up and dressed—or partially dressed—in a shapely bathing suit of Mary’s surmounted by a glamorous gold lamé stole. Thus accoutred, she was posing on tiptoe in front of the long mirror in her mother’s bedroom, her white, bony little legs mottled with cold, and her arms outstretched, the wide, glittering stole draped insecurely over them so that they looked like great floppy, pleading wings.

  Her back was to the door, so Katharine was able to watch her for a moment unnoticed, amusement swiftly obliterating her terror. But all the same, it was much too late for playing about like this.

  “Angela,” she called, and the little girl whirled round, her draperies whirling with her. Whether all that graceful amazement was real or feigned it was impossible to say. “Angela, it’s much too late for all this. Why aren’t you in bed?”

  The outspread gold wings buckled and drooped. Angela’s whole body abandoned its pose of floating grandeur, and took on a posture appropriate for dealing with something that simply wasn’t fair.

  “But it’s not my bedtime yet,” she protested, aggrieved. “It’s only twenty past eight.”

  At first Katharine did not believe her, so strong was her sensation of having slept for a long, long time; and even when a glance at the little bedside clock had confirmed Angela’s statement, she still felt somehow dismayed—at a loss, uprooted. To find that her long, deep sleep had lasted less than a quarter of an hour, and that the whole evening was, after all, still in front of her, was an extraordinary sensation—as if she had actually travelled in time, forward to midnight and then back again.

  “Look how well I can do a Soutenu Turn”, Angela was saying, twirling with lightness, precision, and very nearly grace in front of the mirror. “Auntie Pen says I’m good. She says that if I was her child she’d let me have ballet lessons.”

  “And won’t your parents let you?” asked Katharine, surprised: for whatever Mary and Alan might be failing to give their adopted daughter, they had never seemed to grudge her any material advantages.

  “Oh, they don’t not let me,” explained Angela. “It’s just that they don’t … they aren’t …” Vocabulary failed her when it came to trying to express in words the narrowing whirlpool of self-absorption into which she sensed that her parents were being sucked, leaving them with no energy to spare for her and her needs.

  “It’s not that they won’t do it,” was the nearest she could get. “It’s just that they won’t do it.” And then, reverting to the other theme: “I wish I was Auntie Pen’s child.”

  She said it simply, as another child might say, “I wish I lived in the country.” Katharine supposed that Angela’s background had led her to feel that a change of parents was roughly equivalent to moving house—something not very likely, but perfectly possible, and rather exciting.

  “Well, anyway”—Katharine evaded the issue—“hadn’t you better take those things off now, and begin getting ready for bed? Does your mother let you borrow her clothes like this?”

  “She doesn’t stop me,” Angela responded cautiously, and slowly removed the stole from her shoulders. “All right. I don’t mind going to bed now. Now it is half-past eight.”

  Honour thus being satisfied, Katharine went downstairs and resumed her place on the sofa, this time with Flora’s jeans on her lap. Also needle, black cotton, and the new zip.

  But no scissors. Fancy having forgotten to bring something as indispensible as scissors, thought Katharine crossly, getting off the sofa once more. If she went home to fetch them, she would only get entangled in some wearisome problem or other of her family’s: some argument to settle; some question to answer; some object to find—something they could perfectly well cope with for themselves so long as she simply wasn’t there.

  Mary must have some scissors somewhere, surely? Katharine began vaguely looking around the room, but after a minute’s fruitless search she gave it up and called up the stairs to Angela.

  Yes. Mummy kept her scissors in the table drawer, Angela informed her, pattering swift and light down the stairs in pyjamas. In the corner of the drawer … just here….

  But they weren’t. Angela rummaged deeper and deeper, shuffling paper, string, and many varied objects to the front of the drawer as she did so. Among the flotsam Katharine recognised with surprise a photograph of Stephen. It was one he had had to have taken some time ago, for a centenary publication at his firm, and he seemed to have worn for the occasion an expression of unrelieved gloom and misery.

  “How did it get here?” she asked, picking it up, and Angela glanced back casually.

  “Oh, I expect it’s the one Jane brought to school,” she surmised vaguely. “We were all bringing all the photographs we could find of dark, criminal-looking men, you see, so as to have an Identity Parade in Dinner Play. He wasn’t chosen as the criminal, though,” she added, with a patronising jerk of her head towards the photograph in Katharine’s hand. “Mandy Callaghan’s brother got the most votes. He has a most dreadful, grinning face as well as two teeth missing where he fell off his bike. He looked ever so criminal; and so Mandy won. It wasn’t fair, though, really, because …”

  “Jane shouldn’t have taken it without asking,” protested Katharine absently, her attention returning to the question of the scissors. “Isn’t there anywhere else where your mother keeps scissors?” she asked. “They don’t seem to be in here, and I’m sure she won’t like us muddling up the whole drawer like this. Aren’t there any others?”

  “There’s a pair in the kitchen that don’t cut,” volunteered Angela, after a moment’s thought. “And I’ve got a pair that don’t cut, too,” she added generously, and waited expectantly for Katharine to make her choice.

  “Well—can I borrow both of them, do you think?” said Katharine, smiling. “I’ll see which works best.”

  Angela ran off; and in a few minutes Katharine was once again settled on the sofa with the jeans and the two blunt pairs of scissors, one of which worked quite well if you pulle
d on the upper blade with your forefinger, inserted the cotton exactly one and a half inches up, and held it taut with your other hand.

  For the next couple of hours she worked steadily, without interruption. After the jeans the chair-cover. After that the winter coats. Apart from the rustling and heaving of the great garments as she shifted them about on her lap, the house was quite silent; and after a while Katharine began to be aware again of that odd sense of having lived through the whole evening once before. For a second time, surely, she was mending this lining … that sandal strap … soon, for a second time, it would be half-past eleven, and she would be wondering why the Prescotts were not back yet.

  And if now, in the midst of this quietness, she were suddenly to hear a knock on the front door, would that be for the second time? And would she—for a second time—sit here not answering it? Just listening, tense, terrified, knowing that the knock would come again?

  No, if course not. None of this had happened, nor was going to happen. This queer sense of familiarity was neither memory not foreknowledge, but simply imagination—imagination triggered off partly by that useless clock and partly by Mary’s ridiculous instructions about not answering the door, for all the world as if she was Snow White in the fairy story. As if there might really be a witch out there in the damp suburban night, who would try to sell her a rosy apple to choke her, or a pair of stays to squeeze the breath out of her—or what was that third thing? …

  Drowsily Katharine chopped at her last fastening with the annoying scissors, dropped the last garment on the pile at her side, and leaned back against the cushions. And it was then that a wild, desperate knocking at the front door thundered and rattled through the house.