The Trouble-Makers

by Celia Fremlin

  Katharine stood still and listened to the huge, faint tumult of the dying season. It was a mistake, of course; for as soon as she stood still and listened she began to fancy she heard other sounds, too—definite, yet inexplicable. Was that a drop of water falling, sharp and hollow, on some tinkling metal surface? Could it really be the damp, windless air that set yonder bush stirring—and what was that sharp crack, as of a snapping twig? Of course, dead twigs do fall off old trees and bushes—otherwise how would you find them littering the ground?—but somehow you don’t expect to be there when they are doing it. And now Katharine’s eyes, too, were accustoming themselves to the darkness, peering deep into dim shapes and dripping hollows. It was with a real effort of will that she made herself realise that the strange dark blob on the path in front was only an old boot; that the queer, crouching shape among the bushes ahead of her could only be another discarded mattress, thrown in some awkward way so that in the darkness it seemed to have shoulders, and a drooping, listening head.

  As she stood, Katharine felt her fear growing. If only she had kept walking briskly on she would have been in Chatsworth Avenue by now, under the bright lights and with the long shining cars whizzing by. How could she have been so foolish as to stand like this, letting her fear catch up with her—for all the world as if Fear had been following a few yards behind ever since she had left her home. And yet how difficult it was, having once stood still, to dare to move again. And to move, too, in the direction of that dim, crouching figure, mattress though it must be. Katharine forced herself to take a step … and then another … firmly, confidently, nearer and nearer to that lumpish shadow. Alongside it … and now, thank God, past it…. And now simply to walk and walk, and not look back, no, not look back even though a new, a different rustling sound seemed to come from the bushes … a scrambling sound … and now, Oh God, a thudding….

  Katharine felt her coat grabbed from behind, a hand clutched her shoulder, and before she could cry out a hand came over her mouth.

  “Hush, Katharine!” came Mary’s voice, hissing into her ear in the darkness. “Don’t speak! He’ll hear us!”

  Katharine felt quite giddy with the fear and tension somersaulting out of her body, and bewilderment replacing them.

  “What on earth, Mary?” she whispered, pushing Mary’s restraining hand away from her mouth. “What do you mean? What are you doing here? Who will hear us?”

  “Hush!” repeated Mary once more, as Katharine turned to face her. “He will hear you! He was hanging about under the lamp, just as Angela said. And Auntie Pen said. Oh, Katharine, I didn’t believe it, but they were right. He was there!”

  “Who was?” repeated Katharine stupidly. “What are you talking about——”

  But Mary interrupted, in a fierce whisper.

  “You know who I mean, Katharine,” she declared hoarsely. “I’m telling you. He was under the lamp-post by our house, just as Angela and Auntie Pen described. I saw him myself, just as I was starting out to fetch Angela from this party. A dark man wearing a raincoat, Katharine! Oh, I was so frightened!”

  “But what of?” persisted Katharine, in deepening bewilderment. “Surely you, of all people——And anyway, why should he be here, in the Building Site, if you saw him at home? Do you mean he’s been following you? If so, let’s for goodness’ sake get out of here.” She took Mary’s arm and almost dragged her towards the lights of Chatsworth Avenue, scolding her roundly—and no longer in a whisper—as they went.

  “Honestly, Mary, I do think you’re silly. I don’t for a minute suppose that this man of yours is after any harm, but if you were feeling frightened of him, then what on earth possessed you to come across the Building Site? Why didn’t you go round by the road—or by bus, if it comes to that? Honestly—of all the crazy things to do if you’re afraid that a man’s following you!”

  Katharine almost laughed, so safe did she feel now, and so near to Chatsworth Avenue. She turned, smiling, to look at her companion; and was met not, as she had expected, by a look of rueful apology, nor even by one of continuing fear—but by one of total puzzlement.

  “But, Katharine,” Mary protested, stumbling up the tufty bank towards the road, “But Katharine, he wasn’t following me. Don’t you understand? I was following him!”

  CHAPTER XIX

  “MARY! What do you mean?”

  Katharine stared at her companion in total bewilderment. Under the dazzle of unaccustomed light, she fancied for a second that Mary’s face looked strangely smooth—almost tranquil. But no; the familiar troubled look was back again, sharper than ever, as she began to speak.

  “But Katharine, of course I had to follow him,” she protested. “I wanted to know who he was—why he was hanging about there. I mean, he’s been seen three times now, by one person or another, as well as the night that Alan was stabbed.”

  “But——” Katharine stopped, her mind spinning. Surely Mary must realise that all these dark men in raincoats who had been seen were simply the outcome of people’s imaginations, stimulated by Alan’s faked story? The world was absolutely full of dark men in raincoats, and at any given moment some more or less calculable number of them would undoubtedly be found standing under lamp-posts, just as a calculable number of them would at that same moment be found eating pork chops, buying ties, or winding up clocks. But none of this was sinister coincidence, it was merely sociology, or statistics, or something: the sort of thing you read about when you had finished everything else in the paper. Katharine opened her mouth to explain (as well as she could) this reassuring aspect of the situation, but Mary interrupted.

  “I know what you’re going to say, Katharine,” she complained. (Did she know? Ever afterwards, Katharine was to wonder whether, if she had forced Mary to listen to her, it would have made any difference to the events that were to follow.) “I know what you’re going to say, but truly, Katharine, you don’t understand. Such queer things have been happening to me lately … and now this man under the lamp … he was the last straw. Can’t you understand that?”

  “Yes, of course I can,” lied Katharine, without stopping to consider whether she understood it or not, so convenient a foothold did it offer for bringing in what she wanted to say. “But you see, Mary, what you must realise is that in a case like this people are bound to chatter—to spread rumours—exaggerate everything. You see, they can’t know that——”

  “Oh, people!” interrupted Mary scornfully. “It’s not people that are worrying me any longer, Katharine; it’s things. The queer things that have been happening….”

  “What sort of queer things?” Katharine took her friend’s arm and urged her gently along the pavement, for after all they did have to get to the party. “What kind of things do you mean?”

  “There’s a strange raincoat in our house,” blurted out Mary abruptly. “Hanging on the pegs in the hall. It’s not Alan’s, and we haven’t had a visitor lately. What’s it doing, hanging in our hall? Eh?”

  Katharine decided to ignore the uncalled-for aggressiveness of Mary’s tone. She laughed, lightly.

  “There’s about a dozen strange coats in our hall, I should think,” she declared cheerfully. “And Wellington boots, too, and odd gloves. You must be a terribly good housewife, Mary, if you’re surprised to find just one old coat that you can’t account for. I thought everyone had them, by the dozen.”

  “You can joke about it,” responded Mary sourly, “but it’s not happening in your house. I tell you, I don’t know where this raincoat came from. It suddenly appeared, a day or two ago. From nowhere. Whose is it? Why?”

  “Could it be the one we gave Angela for the guy?” Katharine asked suddenly. “She didn’t use it, you know, in the end, so I suppose it must be somewhere in your house. Couldn’t Alan or someone have found it and hung it up just for tidiness?”

  “You mean it’s Stephen’s coat?” asked Mary sharply. “But that makes it queerer still. Because, do you know, I found a photograph of Stephen in my little drawer this
afternoon. As if it had been planted there. Because I’ve never possessed a photograph of your husband. Why should I? Why on earth should I? It seems so queer…. And now you following me tonight….”

  “Well, honestly, Mary, this is too much!” exploded Katharine. “I might as well accuse you of following me! I’m going to fetch the girls from the party, of course. You’re just working yourself up deliberately—distorting things and talking nonsense—just for the sake of causing a scene. I’m not surprised Alan gets furious with you….”

  Mary’s hostility crumpled in a second. She began to cry, softly, clutching Katharine’s arm tighter, and with her other hand scuffling in her pocket for a handkerchief.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Katharine,” she gulped. “Of course I know it’s not your fault. It’s nothing to do with you—or Stephen either, of course. I know that really. But sometimes I feel I can’t trust anybody. I feel hemmed in by people, all watching … guessing … talking about me … and I think and think, and picture it all, until the very sight of a man’s raincoat sets me shivering. I know it’s silly—I know really it was just a burglar, but somehow I can’t believe it. I keep feeling that there’s something else … something worse … closer to us….”

  “But Mary—you know it wasn’t——” Katharine burst out in astonishment. “You and I know it wasn’t——” “A burglar” she was going to finish, but suddenly, urgently, Mary squeezed her arm. There seemed to be a message in that squeeze—some desperate, forbidden message to be smuggled in code across that invisible frontier which even the closest friendship cannot leave unmanned. For a second Katharine was utterly at a loss; and then, slowly, a possible meaning of the message began to dawn.

  Perhaps Mary had been lying to her. Right from the very beginning. When she had confessed to Katharine that she had stabbed Alan herself, the confession might have been false. Alan’s story about the dark man in the raincoat might have been quite simply true—which would explain why he had stuck to it so obstinately! How simple—and how obvious—an explanation!

  But why should Mary have lied like this? To shield someone, perhaps? A lover, as suggested by Mrs Forsyth? At the thought that Mrs Forsyth’s vulgar, uncalled-for aspersions might turn out to be perfectly correct, Katharine’s whole soul squirmed in revulsion. As so many others have done, she fought briefly and vainly against the hard realisation that opinions are not necessarily false because they are held by people you don’t like, any more than they are necessarily true because they are held by people you do.

  And this was a terribly plausible opinion. For what other motive could be strong enough to induce a woman gratuitously to draw upon herself the blame for such a crime?

  But it was still queer. For, given that Mary was telling these lies to shield her lover, why should she tell them only to Katharine? To everyone else—even to the police—she had backed up Alan’s story—if not in actual words, then by silent acquiescence. What sort of shielding was this, which shielded the criminal from one person only, and that a person who had nothing whatever to do with any of it?

  It almost began to make it look as if Katharine had got something to do with it—or as if Mary thought she had. Suddenly Katharine became aware that they had been walking along in silence for several minutes: and with this awareness came a strange feeling that Mary had been listening all the time—listening to Katharine’s very thoughts as they paced along the rainy street towards their destination. For her head was turned half sideways, attentively, towards Katharine.

  Or was Katharine mistaken in how long they had been walking in silence? For when Mary spoke, it was to answer Katharine’s last remark, just as if there had been no intervening pause.

  “Of course I know it wasn’t,” she echoed Katharine’s unfinished protest. “Things can’t really be—uncanny—can they? Of course I know that really. But all the same, I have this queer feeling that——”

  “Mummy!”

  Jane’s small, ecstatic figure whirled like a missile through the glitter of rain, and into Katharine’s arms. She was followed at a more leisurely, lordly pace by Flora.

  “We thought we’d better start home,” announced the latter, reprovingly, as she drew near. “You’re terribly late, do you know, Mummy. Mrs Moffat was getting awfully fed up with us—you know, in that extra welcoming sort of way that mothers have to get fed up with not their own children. We were nearly the last. Jane said we ought to wait for you, and that Mrs Moffat didn’t mind, but I could tell that she did. And anyway, I know the way home perfectly well.”

  “But where’s Angela? Has she gone with someone else?”

  It was Katharine, not Mary, who spoke; and Flora turned round and peered vaguely into the dazzle of darkness behind her.

  “No. Yes. That is, she said her Auntie Pen was coming for her,” she explained perfunctorily. “She wasn’t ready to come with us, anyway: she’d lost her propelling pencil, or something, and Mr Moffat was helping her look for it down all the sides of the armchairs. They found nearly two shillings all in pennies and threepennies, and he said she could have it. She took it, too. I wouldn’t have if it had been me. It would have been politer to refuse, don’t you think, Mummy?”

  “Not necessarily,” retorted Katharine, irritated by Flora’s smug self-assurance. “In fact, to refuse might have been rather snubbing—it would depend on the circumstances. But anyway——”

  “Oh, Mummy, there were such lovely prizes!” burst out Jane, clutching her mother’s arm and dragging all her exultant weight on it. “I got a sweet little teeny red monkey in a matchbox—look! Isn’t he a darling; he’s going to live on my shelf. And, oh, Flora’s so lucky! Do you know what she got? She got a mouth-organ!”

  “You can have it if you like. I don’t want it.”

  Flora thrust the instrument towards her sister with an off-hand, rejecting gesture which somehow (and was this deliberate?) took all the pleasure out of the transaction. Well, not all of it; and not for long. Jane was a resilient child, and a mouth-organ was, after all, a mouth-organ. Soon she was running joyfully ahead, clutching both her treasures, while Flora loitered behind with her elders, ears pricked for the snippets of unsuitable gossip that she had learned were never long in making themselves heard once her mother and Mrs Prescott were together, and once she had succeeded in making them forget her existence.

  “Oughtn’t we to go back and make sure about Angela?” Katharine was saying, hesitating on the pavement. “Did you know that her Auntie Pen was fetching her?”

  Mary shrugged; and there was unconcealed bitterness in her voice as she answered.

  “Oh, don’t worry! Nobody ever tells me anything! If she says Auntie Pen’s fetching her, then Auntie Pen is fetching her. It’s all been arranged over my head, naturally. I dare say she’ll go home with Auntie Pen and spend the night there, and I shan’t know anything about it unless I like to go down on my knees and ask!”

  Katharine was aware of Flora’s ears almost tingling aloud at her elbow, so she could not allow herself to encourage Mary in this sort of talk, consumed by curiosity though she herself was.

  “Oh well. That’s all right, then,” she said brightly and unconvincingly, quickening her pace in the direction of home. “But it’s a pity you’ve had to come for nothing. Such a wet, miserable night, too.”

  But Mary wasn’t so easily put off. She stared belligerently at the aforesaid night, as if summoning its wetness and miserableness to her side in some incommunicable battle.

  “Oh yes. It’s all right,” she commented sourly. “Perfectly all right. Why shouldn’t it be? Did you know, Katharine, that Alan has asked Auntie Pen to have Angela to stay with her indefinitely? For the rest of this term, I mean; and to go back with her for the Christmas holidays?”

  “No—I didn’t know,” said Katharine cautiously, and terribly aware of Flora breathless with interest at her side. “But mightn’t it be quite a good idea, Mary? For the holidays, anyway. Didn’t you tell me that Mrs Quentin lives in the country for most of
the year? I should think Christmas in the country would be lovely for Angela—a real change. And a rest for you, Mary. You told me you were dreading the Christmas preparations this year. A real rest is just what you need.”

  Slowly, Mary turned her face towards Katharine, her eyes so large and shining that one should have been struck by their beauty. But somehow their brilliance seemed to go beyond beauty tonight; and Katharine was somehow afraid.

  “Rest!” repeated Mary in a harsh undertone. “A real rest! Do you know that that’s exactly what Alan said—those very words?” Her voice dropped almost to a whisper: through the spitting and swishing of the cars on the wet road, Katharine could hardly hear the next words:

  “Why has he done it, Katharine? Why is he so anxious to get Angela out of the house? Sometimes—I almost think—that he knows something. That he knows—he expects—that something is going to happen….”

  It was impossible that Flora shouldn’t have heard something of this. No, not heard; Mary had admittedly kept her voice too low for that; but that sort of whisper doesn’t need hearing, exactly, for its meaning to be conveyed. Mary should really have been more careful—should have remembered that Flora was with them.

  Katharine could not stop to analyse the source of her dismay. Was it really anxiety lest Flora should be frightened or distressed—Flora, so tough, so self-confident, and so reassuringly self-centred into the bargain—surely she, more even than most children, was well insulated against other people’s troubles? Or was she afraid for Mary’s sake, lest Flora should spread even more silly, ill-informed gossip than had been going around already? Whatever it was, she knew with certainty that this conversation must cease forthwith. It could be continued some time when they were alone—anytime.