The Trouble-Makers Read Online Free Page B

inky, and bedraggled, and only just starting on her French. She was still working at the kitchen table, and watching her, Katharine wondered, as she had often done before, whether to curse that triumphant day when Clare had scraped through the eleven-plus and won herself a place at the grammar school. The secondary modern would have presented other problems, of course—but wouldn’t they at least have been more cheerful ones? Wouldn’t it simply be more fun to have a thirteen- year-old that you had to scold for wearing lipsticks and high heels,rather than one like this, inky and sodden with crying, yet still refusing to give up; still bravely, mercilessly, trying to suck encouragement, information and moral support from one’s own jaded and depleted store? The pile of ironing to be done on her right—the pile of Clare’s difficulties to be solved on her left—and neither seeming to get any less, no matter how Katharine worked on them.
    And, of course, into the midst of this depressing scene it would be Stella, who must plunge, radiating, as usual, an air of having tramped miles across the moors to get here—actually she came from four doors up. So here she was, bursting uninvited through the back door, surging into the small kitchen, and flinging to Katharine a breezy greeting as from wider, nobler spaces, and leaving the scullery door open into the bargain. Katharine went to shut it, the wind whipping round her feet, and came back to invite her visitor to sit down.
    Stella, however, was already seated, her feet stretched out under the ironing board, her eyes greedily fastened on Clare’s French grammar. Katharine knew that look. Ever since Stella had sent her own children to a progressive boarding school, snatching them from under the very jaws of the eleven-plus (just in time to save them from failing, said the neighbours, and just in time to save them from the grammar school treadmill said Stella), she had been bubbling over with self-satisfied condemnation of what she now referred to as the educational rat-race. Since Katharine well knew that this tirade could be triggered off by the mere sight of a tattered geography book on a chair, she waited in trepidation to see what would be the effect of the present scene. The whole thing might have been laid on for Stella’s especial delectation—the slouching, heavy-eyed grammar school girl, the inky books, the lateness of the hour…. In an attempt to avert the armoury of barbed condolences which were about to descend on the unsuspecting Clare, Katharine resorted to swift diversionary tactics, such as offering her visitor coffee, noisily filling the kettle for same, and then asking loudly and enthusiastically after Jack and Mavis in their co-educational paradise.
    Oh, they were fine, Stella assured her. Just fine. Getting on marvellously. Loving every minute.
    As to which there seemed no more to be said. That was the trouble with Stella now; by sending her children to a school so remote geographically and so Utopian in operation, she had, as it were, put herself outside the conversational orbit of her former friends. All the dear, familiar topics—the problems about bedtimes, teachers, boy-friends, homework—all these now extracted from Stella only one comment, always the same: “Well, you see, at Wetherby Hall that sort of thing simply doesn’t arise”. This seemed to apply to absolutely everything, from sexual precocity to not liking custard, and consequently left extraordinarily little to talk about to her fellow mothers. Stella’s interest in other mother’s problems was still unabated, it is true; but there was a sort of gap where her own should have been.
    So Katharine struggled to think of something else to talk about. No inspiration came to her, except to send Clare to bed; and that proved an unfortunate move. As Clare slowly piled one battered book on top of another preparatory to taking them upstairs, Stella’s face took on a beaky, excited look, like