The Trouble-Makers Read Online Free Page A

in the middle—all this week’s batch had been like that—and Flora still leaning on the door waiting for her mother to say Yes or No about the practising, and now—ye Gods, it only wanted that!—now the telephone ringing.
    When Katharine put the receiver down and went back to the kitchen, she could only hope that her daughters did not notice the terrible relief that she could not keep from her voice.
    “That was Daddy,” she told them. “He says he’ll be very late, and not to wait supper for him. So leave your practising till afterwards, if you like, Flora—and Clare, you leave your Latin. I’ll have plenty of time to help you after supper.”
    She would, too; because now it didn’t matter about lighting the sitting-room fire, or cooking cabbage (no one but Stephen liked it), or making things look tidy and welcoming. It was like a sudden holiday—and all because her husband was being kept late at work. When—where in her marriage had she come to feel like this? When had Stephen’s homecoming changed from a pleasant climax to the day, and become an anxious deadline? When had her desire to make things happy and comfortable for him in the evenings changed to a compulsive feeling that she had got to make things happy and comfortable for him in the evenings? Was it since she had started working again, and was always rushed? Or had it come gradually over the years? …
    “Mummy!”
    Nine-year-old Jane this time, darting into the kitchen as quick and bright-eyed as a field-mouse, her straight-cut dark hair misted over with raindrops. “Mummy, me and Angela have been having such a super time! You know where the lamp shines over the wall at the bottom of their garden? Well, you can read by it! Did you know? So we took the little table out of Angela’s greenhouse, and——”
    “But darling, you’re soaking!” Katharine ran her hand over her daughter’s jersey. “You’ll have to change before supper. I’d forgotten you were at Angela’s. You had a nice time, did you? And was Angela’s mother there——?”
    Katharine cut short the seemingly innocent question. Always, always she must be on guard against pumping Jane for inside information about the Prescotts’ domestic troubles, for the temptation to do so was tremendous. This evening, for instance, she was dying to know if Mary Prescott had succeeded indawdling home slowly enough to avoid seeing her husband; and if not, had there been a quarrel? Had they been shouting at each other, or going about in icy silence? Not being able to ask Jane all was like watching a long-awaited instalment of a serial story disappearing into the dustbin.
    But after all Jane very likely knew nothing about the Prescotts’ quarrels. Perhaps even Angela didn’t, in spite of everything that was said about children’s sensitiveness to atmosphere in the home. If children were really so sensitive, mused Katharine ruefully, then how was it that they invariably asked their father for complicated and time-consuming favours at exactly the moment when he had pinched his thumb in the car door, or was frantically searching for an urgently needed book? It often seemed to Katharine that the average child, healthily encased in a carapace of total selfishness, could walk unscathed through a domestic atmosphere that you could cut with a knife.
    “No. Yes. I didn’t see her.” Jane’s answer broke in on Katharine’s speculations. “A sort of grandmother person gave us tea,” she continued conversationally. “A much nicer tea than Mrs Prescott gives us. Toast, and real honey in a honeycomb ! I wish we had a grandmother.”
    “I’ll put it on the grocery list next week,” promised Katharine absently. “The honeycomb, I mean, not the grandmother. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Now do run upstairs, dear, and take off your wet things. I’m just dishing up.”
    By nine o’clock the two younger girls were in bed and only Clare was left—no longer crying, but looking pale and