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By Root 1527 0

who must be lonely. By the day of the party, which started at midday, as many as a hundred people were jostling one another all over the house, and half of them were probably still there at midnight, being fed out of Dorothy’s saucepan, the size of a hip bath. They were wonderful parties. Everyone said so. Alice said so. “Oh, good,” she would cry, “are we going to have another party,” and at once began fretting to help. When she was older, after ten or so, she could tell she was being useful, but as a small child she was tolerated (only just, she knew) by this whirlwind of efficiency that was her mother organising a party. Still, she insisted on arranging fruit on a dish, or disposing ashtrays around the house, while her mother reduced her pace to Alice’s. At least while “helping,” Alice did not feel quite so much as if she were a tiny creature on top of a great wave, frantically and hopelessly signalling to her mother, who stood indifferently on the shore, not noticing her.

When there were parties, when there were people in the house, it seemed Alice became invisible to her mother, and had no place in her own home.

People always stayed the night after the parties: drunks, or those who didn’t want to drink and drive, or some who had come from other towns. And then Dorothy would say to Alice, casually, in the full ringing confident voice that went with being so successfully in control of this great gathering of people which had made the whole house—not to mention the street—explode with noise and music for hours and hours, “Alice, you’ll just have to give up your room. Can you go down the road and sleep with Anne?” (Alice’s best friend during most of her childhood). “No, why not? Oh, go on, Alice, don’t be difficult. Then you’d better bring your sleeping bag into our room.”

Alice always protested, complained, sulked, made a scene—manifestations that of course scarcely got noticed, so many other things were going on by that stage of the party: women guests in the kitchen washing up, intimate conversations between couples up and down the stairs, the last tipsy dancers circling around the hall. Who could possibly have time to care that Alice was sulking again? Sleeping in her parent’s bedroom made her violently emotional, and she could not cope with it.

Four in the morning, and she was in her sleeping bag on a foam-rubber pad along the wall under the window. Cedric Mellings, in his dashing pyjamas, dark red, dark blue, was drunk or tight; at any rate expansive. He loved his wife’s parties and was proud of her. He always did the drinks, hired the glasses—coped with all that. Dorothy Mellings wore one of the beautiful things she used for sleeping in, a “Mother Hubbard” perhaps, or a kimono, or a kanga from Kenya wrapped around her in one of innumerable ways. She was tight, not much, but did not need to be, for she was high, she was exalted, she was floating, she could not stop smiling as she slid into bed by Cedric and lay there groaning theatrically, “My God, my feet.”

He would put his arm round her, she snuggled up—a glance, a quick reminder from one or the other that Alice was in the room—some sleepy kisses, and they would be off, asleep. But Alice was not asleep. She lay there tense, in the—at last—silent house, in that room which was far from silent because … how much noise two sleeping people did make! Ii was not just their breathing, deep and unpredictable, coming regularly, then changing on a gulp, or a snort. Cedric tended to snore, but, apparently becoming aware of this himself, would turn over on his side, and thereafter sleep more becomingly. Not silently, though.

That breathing of theirs going on up there in the dark, she could not stop listening, for it seemed that something was being said that she ought to be understanding—but she could not quite reach it, grasp it. The two different breathings, in and out, in and out, went on and went on, had to go on—yet could stop unpredictably for what seemed like minutes; though of course Alice knew that was nonsense, it was only because she was straining her ears with