STEPHEN WAS STILL out when Katharine got home, and at first she felt nothing but relief. It was so easy to give the children just crisps and bread and jam for supper; so easy, too, to deal single-handed with the argument about why Flora as well as Jane should go straight to bed afterwards. Not that she dealt with it very efficiently, and certainly not very quickly; but this way at least it was only one argument. It wasn’t followed by another argument about why she allowed Flora to argue so much, and yet another about why they were always arguing about whether Flora should be allowed to argue so much.
By half-past nine it was all over, and Katharine was sitting quiet and relaxed by the fire, with Clare chewing her penholder gently in the armchair opposite. After dawdling vaguely through the day, doing a little knitting, a little reading, and making a batch of coconut macaroons, Clare had suddenly decided to settle down to her homework after supper. And, of course, she wanted to do it by the fire in the sitting-room.
But it was all right so far. She wasn’t crying, even though it was Latin again. Strands of straight fair hair fell across her face, as they always did when she was working, but the effect tonight was somehow pleasantly casual rather then distraught. The gentle, expressive mouth looked grave, even determined, but no longer desperate.
As Katharine studied her daughter with cautious satisfaction, the girl looked up.
“It’s a funny thing, Mummy,” she observed, “but I seem able to understand the gerunds quite well so long as I don’t think about them. Like the way you can see the Pleiades best if you don’t look right at them—do you know how I mean? It’s just the opposite from algebra—the more you think about that, the better you understand it. It’s very interesting, isn’t it, the different ways there are of understanding different things.”
Katharine smiled, and with her thirteen-year-old daughter embarked boldly and cheerfully on the ancient puzzle of the Nature of Understanding. But it was Clare’s nature, of course, that she had in mind as she talked. Perhaps, after all, it hadn’t been a mistake to have sent her to the grammar school. Perhaps in her own plodding, worrying, difficult way she would get more out of it than any of them?
And now Clare was deep in her books again, and everything was very quiet. There had been a few unexplained thuds from upstairs a few minutes ago, and a sharp, perfunctory shriek of protest; but whatever it was must have beeen settled—probably in Flora’s favour—quite quickly, for there had been no more sounds.
The fire was dying down now, ash already beginning to whiten near the bars, but it didn’t seem worth making it up. Soon it would be bedtime. In fact it had been Clare’s bedtime long ago, but it seemed a shame to interrupt her just when she was getting on so nicely with her work. But as she sat there, lapped in quietness and what should have been peace, Katharine was aware of a now familiar uneasiness nibbling away at her tranquillity.
How was Mary now? Should Katharine have stayed with her for a little after they got home? Had it been right to allow her, in her nervous state, to go alone into her empty, darkened house?
Hang it all, she wasn’t Mary’s keeper, was she? And hadn’t she had enough on her hands, with her own clamorous, excited pair just back from their party; both claiming after their huge party tea, to be “starving”, and both having to be absolutely driven to bed? And anyway, Mary wouldn’t have been alone for long. Auntie Pen and Angela would probably have turned up soon, and Alan too, presumably, some time or other. Mary would have been busy enough getting a meal ready for them all—or if she hadn’t, then she ought to have been, Katharine reflected censoriously. Besides, Mary had seemed cheerful enough, almost back to normal, by the time they’d all got off the bus and hurried up the road—though Katharine was aware that she’d more or less forced normal behaviour on her companion by her own briskness, her bright, superficial chatter. And I was quite right, Katharine went on reassuring herself. It was just what Mary needed—someone to make her pull herself together and behave sensibly. Too much sympathy and attention would simply encourage her to brood, to get more wrapped up in herself than ever.
So Katharine’s sensible, reassuring reflections ran their course, and in doing so made not the slightest dent in her growing uneasiness; her slow, unwilling consciousness that something was building up next door; was mounting, even now, to some climax; and that she, Katharine, was inextricably involved. The dying fire stirred, as yet another once glowing cinder dropped softly into darkness; Clare’s pen scratched unevenly and then stopped, poised in doubt; and Katharine sat very still, her sewing untouched in her lap, her newspaper unread at her side.
The sudden, sharp ring at the front door was like a long-awaited summons, and Katharine leapt to her feet, her heart beating wildly. Clare glanced up, vaguely startled.
“Who is it, Mummy?” she asked—quite absurdly from one point of view, since Katharine could not know any more than she did; and yet from another point of view quite understandably, for Katharine’s feeling of having expected just this must surely have got across to her.
“I don’t know,” said Katharine, almost feeling that she was lying; and hurried out into the hall.
The tall, elegant young woman in the doorway was a total stranger, and Katharine in her surprise stared almost rudely at the unfamiliar face under a cloud of high-piled hair. Delicately plucked brows arched beautifully over lustrous, greenish eyes with black, thickly mascaraed lashes. The scarlet mouth smiled confidently at Katharine as the young woman stepped, uninvited but with assurance, into the hall. There she hesitated, poised gracefully on her three-inch heels, her light blue swagger coat swaying round her.
“Where’s Clare?” she asked. “I’ve forgotten the Latin homework again, and old Fossie’ll be furious, so I …”
Katharine’s mind lurched into focus … spinning as down a helter-skelter in the effort of adjustment. So this glittering vision was simply Brenda Forbes, whom Katharine had last seen (surely only a few weeks back?) as an inky schoolgirl, barely as tall as Clare, her satchel bumping against her stout bare legs as she ran for the school bus.
“Of course. Come along in, Brenda,” gulped Katharine, still trying to readjust herself to the transformation, and led the visitor into the sitting-room.
Clare greeted her classmate without any great enthusiasm, but without surprise, and soon the two girls were crouched on the sofa, marking pages in Clare’s Latin book, and arguing about whether Miss Foster had said they could or they couldn’t leave out questions 8 and 9 because they weren’t about the pluperfect subjunctive. One of Brenda’s three-inch heels was tucked awkwardly under her as she sat, coat rumpled, just where she had flung herself, the other had fallen from her foot, inky under its 15-denier nylon, and lay on its side under the table. Feeling that perhaps the transformation in Brenda was less than she had at first supposed, Katharine left them to it, and went into the kitchen to tidy up and put things ready for the morning.
But it was hard to concentrate. All those useful, and indeed perfectly justifiable, thoughts about Mary’s affairs being none of her business, and about the whole thing being a lot of hysterical nonsense anyway—all these thoughts seemed to whirr in her mind like so many road drills, both distracting and meaningless. By the time Brenda had been got out of the house, and Clare had been sent gradually to bed, Katharine’s feeling of impending disaster had become unbearable. Softly she unbolted the scullery door and stepped out into the night.
From here, at the far end of the lawn, just before you stepped backwards into the brussels sprouts, you could see all the Prescott back windows—and the lights were on in every single one.
Was this a good sign, or a bad one? What, indeed, had Katharine expected to discover by staring up at the windows? She had started out into the garden simply on impulse—a sudden, unreasoning dread lest the windows should still be as dark, the house as silent, as when she had let Mary go into it on her own three or four hours ago. But even if they had been, what would it have signified? Probably simply that the whole family were already in bed and asleep—and why not, at half-past ten on a wet winter’s night?
Katharine shivered a little in the heavy, autumn air. Not that it was cold, exactly: only wet, and dismal, and forbidding. And it certainly wasn’t dark; all those lighted windows, even though most of them were curtained, threw a suffused, shapeless brightness over the gardens. Katharine, standing here, must be clearly visible to anyone who cared to look.
Even as the thought crossed her mind, Katharine was aware of a sudden movement behind the curtains at one of the Prescotts’ windows—Mary’s bedroom window, Katharine recognised in the instant. A darkness—a shadow, a something too vague to be called a silhouette—appeared at the join of the curtains. For a moment they swung apart, and a streak of brilliant light flashed across the garden…. Then they closed again.
Nothing in it, of course. Someone had simply pulled them apart for a second, readjusting them, and then dropped them back again. Nothing extraordinary: there could be a thousand reasons for such a gesture.
But of these thousand reasons, only one found a foothold in Katharine’s tense, alerted mind tonight. Suddenly involuntarily, and with distracting vividness, she recalled the evening last week when she had been sitting in with Angela: recalled the swift, silent way Mary had slipped between the long curtains of the sitting-room, and then had stood there, behind them, for long minutes, staring out into the gardens. And had never, in the end, explained to Katharine at what she was staring.
At this very moment Mary might once again be standing up there in the darkness, silently staring down at Katharine—who was silently staring up towards her. An eerie, almost superstitious terror kept Katharine for a moment standing absolutely still…. Though, of course, this was the worst thing she could possibly do if Mary was watching. She seemed to hear again Mary’s absurd accusation earlier in the evening “Why are you following me, Katharine?” To stand staring like this, motionless and in silence, would surely give foundation to whatever idiotic suspicion Mary was harbouring.
Quickly, idiotically, Katharine began trying to behave naturally in her unsought limelight. She bent down, pretending to examine the brussels sprouts—as if anyone could in this darkness! Then she pretended she was pulling up a weed—as if anyone would at this time of night! And then, her meagre resources at an end, she simply fled: across the lawn, and into the blessed anonymous darkness of the side passage with the dustbins.
Well! Of all the silly, childish ways to behave! And probably Mary hadn’t been watching anyway, Katharine scolded herself, as she felt her way along the passage, crashing first into Curfew’s tin of sawdust and then into the broken mowing machine that the dustmen wouldn’t take.
But still, just in case Mary had been watching, Katharine ought to go round and apologise. Well, not apologise, exactly, but explain … get out of it somehow before Mary got any more odd, suspicious ideas into her head. And if it turned out that Mary hadn’t seen her—well, no harm would be done. Half-past ten wasn’t so very late to be calling on a close friend, especially when they were all so obviously wide awake, with all those lights on everywhere.