The Trouble-Makers Read Online Free

thought Katharine ungratefully), “Mummy, I tried to light the sitting-room fire for you. But it’s gone out.”
    Katharine’s carefully laid fire. The dry wood—the paper—all would be gone; only the black, hopeless lumps of coal would be left; and the black, dead slivers of burnt paper would float out all over the carpet, gently tinkling, as soon as you disturbed them. More wood—and it would be damp this time—must be fetched from the shed.
    “Thank you, darling. Never mind.” Katharine hoped that she had kept the irritation out of her voice, for, after all, the child had been trying to help. It was hard on them to have to come back from school to an empty, fireless home. Hard on Stephen, too, to have to come home to a supper always late, a wife always preoccupied—and tonight, on top of everything else, to a daughter crying over her homework.
    It was this that was going to cause the row tonight, and for a moment Katharine stood very still in the middle of the hall, paralysed by the total conflict of her situation.
    For Stephen always said that she shouldn’t help Clare. “Doing her homework for her” was what he called it— deliberately provocative, Katharine felt, for he must surely know that she never actually did the homework; just explained it. And explained, and explained, and explained. That, of course, was probably the trouble—not that Stephen really disapproved on principle, as he claimed to do, but simply that he couldn’t stand spending his evening listening to his wife explainingabout present participles, or square roots, or whatever. And what husband would like it, she asked herself, with a deliberate effort to put herself on Stephen’s side. Immediately she felt a familiar little stab of pleasure at finding she had managed to see something from Stephen’s point of view—followed by an equally familiar little stab of frustration at the fact that there was still nothing she could do about it. For Clare did need help—and needed it, as always, just when Stephen was expected home. One should either be a childless wife or else an unmarried mother, thought Katharine rebelliously as she set off up the stairs—and even in the midst of her anxieties, she found herself thinking how well this cynical observation would go down at one of those comforting Aren’t-Men-Awful sessions at the launderette or over the garden wall.

CHAPTER II
    I T ENDED, OF COURSE , in Clare’s bringing her books down to the kitchen and spreading them about on the table where Katharine was chopping onions against time.
    “It’s a kind of verbal adjective, you see,” Katharine explained all over again, her eyes smarting with the onion smell. “‘To be known’—‘Knowable’—something like that. So it has to agree with the noun. It’s not a verb in the way ‘She knows’ is a verb.”
    “‘She doesn’t know,’ I’d say,” remarked Flora smugly from where she stood, homework all finished, drawing geometrical patterns in a scattering of spilt salt on the dresser. “Mummy, shall I do my practising before supper?”
    Katharine did a swift calculation. If there was to be a quarrel—and what with supper late and Clare crying over her gerundives there almost certainly would be—then Flora’s practising after supper might well be the last straw (“Why on earth can’t that child get her practising done earlier? Can’t we have any peace in this house, ever?”) On the other hand, if Flora was occupied at the piano, then she couldn’t also be irritating her father by asking questions, or arguing—unwittingly rubbing salt on the surface of a mind already raw and exposed from quarrelling with Katharine.
    Katharine felt real tears for a moment soothing away the stinging pain of the onion-tears. Real tears, and no time to indulge them, what with the chops to get on, and Clare wanting to know how a gerundive was different from a passive infinitive, and the potatoes already melting on the outside, yet hard as rocks