The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [114]
But he was there when she woke, squatting lightly beside her, a cup of coffee in his hand. He was beaming, like a boy conscious of behaving well.
“Oh, what is it, Jasper?”
“Clever Alice,” he said gently. “It was wonderful, what you did.”
But she lay straight in her sleeping bag, arms by her side, feet stretched out. She was not thinking of Jasper, or of the Congress, or of the weekend’s fun and games. There was an empty place in her, a pit, a grave; she had been dreaming, she knew, of the house, now boarded up, with the “For Sale” notice outside. And she knew that she must be glistening all over with pale, unshed tears.
“Alice,” said Jasper, “I want to tell you something.”
“I’m listening,” she said, severe and remote, and saw him hesitate, wince. He felt snubbed. She should have cared, but could not.
“Bert and I—we are going to the Soviet Union.”
Having taken this in, she said, “The Irish comrades won’t have you, but the Soviet comrades will?” This was not derisive in the least—only a statement of the position—but she earned a look of hatred. He was on his feet, hovering above her, a furious angel, ready to throw revengeful bolts.
“Look, I don’t want any negative and destructive attitudes from you, Alice.”
Pause. She neither moved nor spoke.
Indecisive, he squatted down again, ready to win her.
“How are you going so quickly? You can’t go just like that to the Soviet Union.”
“On Saturday night one of the comrades from Manchester said that he knew of a tourist group going to Moscow, this week. There are some empty places, because some people fell out, with flu. But we can get visas through the tour organiser. We have sent in our passports, and we’ll get them by the time we leave.”
“Good.”
A pause.
“Alice,” he began tentatively, and stopped. He had been going to ask her for money, but now felt its uselessness.
She said, “You have taken every fucking penny off me already. I’ve spent last week’s dole money on the party. It’s no good trying to get any out of me.” Seeing his face beginning to gather into an avid, cruel look, she said, indifferently, “And it is impossible for me to get money out of Dorothy, or out of my father.”
He remained there, lightly squatting, one hand on the floorboards, studying her face. Then, as lightly, he got up and went to the door. As he left she said, “If Pat comes back before you two leave, Bert won’t go with you.” He slammed the door; she did not turn her head to watch him go, but remained still, like a stone or a corpse, no life in her, looking at the window, now framed by the beautiful brocade curtains, green and gold, that had hung in the sitting room of her mother’s house.
She slept. In the late afternoon she woke in an empty house, bathed, put on a skirt that had been her mother’s, of soft wool that had great pink roses on a soft brown background, and a pink sweater Pat had given her.
She walked straight out of the house and over to 45, where she went in without knocking: the weekend had made the two houses one. Out of the kitchen—a dreary hole, not nice and bright and decorated with flowers, like 43’s—came goose-Muriel, who offered strictly rationed postparty smiles.
“If Andrew is here, I want to see him.”
To prevent any more coy scratchings at the door, Alice went to it with Muriel, and knocked.
“Come in,” she heard, and Alice went in, shutting the door on Muriel.
Comrade Andrew lay, stretched out like a soldier, as Alice had just been doing, on his low bed, but with his arms crossed on his chest.
He swung his legs over and down, sat, made a place for Alice to sit by him.
She did so, at a proper distance. “I have to know some things,” she announced.
“Very well.”
But she sat on there, in a droop, listless, and did not continue.
He studied her for a while, openly, not hiding it, then lay down again, but farther over on the narrow bed, near the wall. He pulled her by her arm; and, without resisting, she lay down next to him, stretched out.