The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [109]
Those two people there, the two great powerful people in that large bed which was the other focus of the house (the great table in the kitchen being the first)—why, it was like sleeping in the same room as two creatures that were hardly human, so alien and secretly dangerous did they seem to Alice as a child, and then growing older, at eleven or twelve, and then older still, at fifteen or so. She changed, grew up, or at least grew older, but it seemed that they did not. Nothing changed. It was always the same, that scene after the party, with the two of them, her parents, sliding into that bed of theirs, arms around each other, and then willingly sliding into the sleep which took them so far from Alice that she was always lifting herself up on her elbow to strain her eyes through the dark of the room towards the two mounds, long, heavy, that were her parents. But were not now her parents, had become impersonal, had gone away from her. Could not be reached. Not unless she crept out of her sleeping bag and went to touch one of them awake. At which Cedric, or Dorothy, would indeed come awake, return to being himself, herself; as if impostors, dark and frightening and mysterious, had inhabited those sleeping bodies but had been chased away by Alice’s touch. But then Dorothy, or Cedric, would say, sleepy and startled, “What is the matter, Alice? Go to sleep.” And they would have already turned away from her, have gone swiftly off into that other country—and the impostors were back, not Dorothy, not Cedric. And then Alice would lie awake, listening to the breathings, the snufflings, thick inarticulate mutterings coming out of that sleep that was going on above her, on the plateau of the bed; and listening to her own blood pumping and swishing through her body, and thinking how gallons of blood were swirling around up there in those two bodies.… She could not sleep; or slept, coming awake with anxiety, and, the moment there was any light behind the silent, listening curtains, which hung there all night, witnesses with her of the absence of Dorothy and Cedric from their bed, their room, their home, their children, she crept out of the room. The house, of course, was in chaos. Everywhere in it people still slept, so that she could hardly dare open a door for fear of what she would see. But in the kitchen it was safe, and there she worked away. She would have liked some help—her brother, Humphrey, for instance. But he was only too happy to accept his parents’ invitation to find some other roof to sleep under, and he was seldom there.
After the age of about twelve, Humphrey was less and less at home, staying not just down the street for a night, but with friends all over the country, sometimes for weeks at a time. To Alice it seemed that it was the parties that began this process. Feeling the way she had done (not that they had ever talked about it, but she just knew), like some small sea creature clinging for dear life to a rock but then being battered and bashed by great waves and washed off, he had drifted away. As she had done, later. But separately; they scarcely saw each other. Asked whether she had brothers and sisters, Alice had to remind herself she had a brother.
Alice had not thought of this for years; it was her arms stretched round the great silvery saucepan that brought it all back. And she could have gone on standing