The Trouble-Makers Read Online Free PDF Page B

the garden, and then Angela had been doing her homework, and it was only when it was bedtime, and there was no one anywhere, that she’d begun to worry.
    “So I packed my satchel and polished my shoes ready for tomorrow,” continued Angela. “And then I brushed my teeth and I went to bed. I hung up my dress, too,” she concluded, virtuously.
    Of course, reflected Katharine. That’s what a frightened child would be sure to do—to obey punctiliously, and all by herself, the rules that usually had to be enforced by constantnagging: the rules that hold together the threatened framework .
    “But you didn’t go to sleep?” prompted Katharine, and Angela agreed that she hadn’t. She’d lain in bed for a while, listening, and slowly coming to the conclusion that “something had happened.” So she’d got up and come next-door to Katharine. That was all. Angela finished her story and looked expectantly at Katharine, with a child’s supreme and arrogant confidence in the adult’s power—and duty—to explain, to reassure, to put matters right.
    Katharine quailed. Angela’s expectant gaze, combined with the total lack of data on which to base any sort of action, intimidated her. But Stella was made of sterner—or more inquisitive—stuff.
    “I think we should go all over the house,” she announced decisively and with relish. “You never know.”
    “They might have left a note or something,” hastily interpolated Katharine, anticipating that “you never know” might be invested by Angela with all sorts of unnerving implications. She wished she knew the child better, so that she might have some idea of the probable direction and extent of her imagination. She wished, too, that Angela could have been left out of the search; but Stella was already striding up the stairs (“We’ll start at the top—do the thing systematically”) with Angela close on her heels.
    The general aspect of the upstairs rooms was one of untidiness and neglect—bedclothes hastily pulled up, assorted garments draped over the chairs, dust filming all the furniture. Stella was as outspoken in her criticism as she dared to be in Angela’s hearing. Too outspoken, it seemed to Katharine; but then Katharine had often reflected that Stella would be a more amiable person if she had either fewer convictions or else less of the courage of them.
    “You’d never think, would you,” observed Stella “that Mary had nothing to do but run the house? No job—nothing! I wonder what she does with herself all day?”
    “She’s pretty busy, you know, really,” answered Katharine,rather repressively. It wasn’t true, of course, but she felt a good deal of sympathy for Mary’s ineffectual housekeeping. For who better than Katharine knew the demoralising effect of a quarrel with one’s husband? How it made one no longer care whether the carpets were swept or the furniture shining: whether the cushions looked better this way or that way, and whether books and papers were piled sideways on the shelves. Quarrelling could do more damage to the appearance of a house than a party for fifty people, all drunk. And the time it took, too! First the shouting, and the slamming doors: then the angry, secret crying … the not speaking to each other. And then the long, long brooding, going over and over what he’d said, and what you’d said, and what you should have said if only you’d thought of it in time. Yes, on second thoughts, Mary probably was a busy woman.
    Downstairs now, with Angela almost falling over their feet with her closeness, they searched first the living-room and then the kitchen, where the remains of the toast and honey tea were still littering the table. Katharine wished that Stella wouldn’t keep looking into cupboards and under tables. It was absurd, and surely full of frightening implications for Angela—although the child made no comment, and indeed peered into all these ridiculous corners with an avidity apparently as great as