IT 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 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 in dawdling 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 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 a terrier, as she scented the educational rat-race:
“Do you always have as much homework as this, Clare?” she asked, with monstrous sympathy “Don’t you get terribly tired?”
Clare thought this over in her slow way.
“Not terribly,” she answered at last, as though she had measured the word against some exact scale before rejecting it. “It’s just on Thursdays, you see. We have four homeworks on Thursdays, with geometry and Latin. Latin always takes me ages.”
“Mavis doesn’t have any homework at all,” responded Stella, as if this fact should somehow lighten Clare’s problem. “In fact, she doesn’t even have to go to lessons if she doesn’t want to. And the funny thing is, she finds she learns more that way than when she was being forced into it! Isn’t that odd?”
The patronising cat! thought Katharine crossly: she doesn’t think it’s odd at all; she’s just trying to show us how marvellous her methods are compared with ours! She was immediately shamed by the look of clear, uncomplicated interest which Clare had turned on their guest. Stella, too, must have been a little taken aback, for she pressed her point home clumsily: “Don’t you think you’d learn more, Clare, if you were at a school like that, where they didn’t force you?”
Clare was silent for a moment, her grey eyes thoughtful under the tear-swollen lids.
“No,” she said at last. “I don’t think I would. I think I’d mean to work, but I’d keep not doing it.” She smiled a little apologetically: “But I expect that’s just me. I expect Mavis is different.”
Stella looked almost affronted at Clare’s total lack of defensiveness; her complete unawareness that either she or her way of life were under fire. Stella turned towards Katharine almost pleadingly, as to a fellow warrior who, although an enemy, did at least know that there was a war on:
“Don’t you find it tiring, yourself?” she enquired. “I mean, having them hanging around doing homework all the evening like this?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Katharine evasively, picking up the iron again. “It’s not much different in the holidays when they’re hanging around doing something else. Or doing nothing—that’s the worst of all, don’t you think? When they have nothing to do.”
“Well, of course, with Mavis and Jack that simply doesn’t arise,” said Stella, stretching out her long legs as smugly and luxuriously as a cat, but with much less dexterity: the ironing board lurched under Katharine’s hand and the kitchen table shuddered: “Mavis and Jack come home so full of interests and enthusiasms that they simply don’t know what boredom is.”
“What sort of interests?” asked Katharine, with genuine curiosity, while she readjusted the toppling ironing board; “Things they do indoors, do you mean, like painting and Meccano and things, or do they go out a lot?”
“Everything,” declared Stella with the emphatic vagueness which characterised most of her assertions about her children. “Every kind of interest you can think of.”
Katharine quelled her impulse to meet this challenge by thinking of interests so outrageous as to force Stella to be more specific. Instead, she finished sending Clare to bed—odd how Clare’s dreamy obedience took up more time and energy, more nagging and pushing, than all Flora’s self-assertiveness or Jane’s mischief—and poured out two cups of coffee. Stella stretched again as she took her cup—but Katharine was prepared for it this time, with a firm grip on both iron and board. Soon they were deep in a discussion of the manifold advantages accruing from a coffee-grinder—which Stella had got too—as compared with the superfluousness of a cream-making machine, which only Katharine had got.
Stella was just in the middle of explaining that real cream was quite cheap nowadays, and that anyway the top of the milk was just as good, also that ordinary milk was really nicer than cream anyway, and contained more protein, when Katharine heard a very small knock on the front door. Unfortunately, Stella hadn’t heard it, so after one or two vain attempts to interrupt, Katharine simply had to leave the room in the middle of hearing about the vitamin content of skim milk. She hurried across the hall just as the very small knock was being repeated a second—or perhaps even a third—time.
It was Angela Prescott, in bedroom slippers and with a winter coat pulled on over her pyjamas. She looked white and rather wide-eyed against the background of rainy darkness, and at first she seemed to have some difficulty in explaining her errand.
“Please—do you think——? That is, do you know where Mummy is?” she asked. “You see, I don’t know what to do. I think something’s happened.”