The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [119]
Alice was disappointed that she must stay in an orderly part of the crowd, but never mind, another time.
Bert said he was going to bed. At once Jasper got up and said he was, too. Alice understood he did not want to be alone with her, though she knew he was happy enough to have her there when Bert was. She went up into the room she had shared with him, next to Bert’s. Bert was of course less noisy without Pat; but he was sleeping badly, as she could hear. And tonight, even with the door tight shut, she could hear that Faye was having one of her turns.
“Faye had one of her turns last night,” Roberta might say, having forgotten that the old-fashioned phrase—Victorian?—once used humorously by Faye (“I was ’aving one of me turns, me dear”)—was meant to be humorous, so that it had become ordinary speech. At the moments when Roberta used it, she acquired a workaday, bygone look, was like a servant or a lower-class person from a play on the box. Theatrical. When were Faye and Roberta themselves? Only when they had been beaten back, down, by some person or situation, into being the people who used those clumsy blurting labouring heavy voices, which made them seem as if they had been taken over by pitiful strangers who could not be expected to know Faye, know Roberta.
Alice slept badly. She woke to hear Reggie and Mary go downstairs; their cheerful voices were loud, as if they were alone in the house and it belonged to them. She heard Roberta and Faye go down, quiet, not talking. It was nine before Bert woke next door; he was lighting cigarettes one after another. She thought, Perhaps we’re not going to get to Queen Bitch Thatcher today. And descended to the empty kitchen, determined not to show disappointment. Then Bert did come. At once he went to wake Jasper, who, she could see, would easily call the whole thing off. It was raining steadily.
But they did get out of the house and to the train; and watched London give way to the country through the dirty train windows and grey shrouds of rain. Bert was silent, thinking his thoughts, which—Alice suspected—he would be sharing with Jasper were she not there. Jasper was being polite with her.
At the station they took a bus to the university. The great cold lunatic buildings looked at them through the downpour, and Alice felt murder fill her heart. She knew most of the new universities; had visited them, demonstrated outside them. When she saw one she felt she confronted the visible embodiment of evil, something that wished to crush and diminish her. The enemy. If I could put a bomb under that lot, she was thinking, if I could … Well, one of these days …
They were late. Outside the main entrance about sixty demonstrators huddled under plastic hoods and umbrellas, herded by eighty-odd policemen. At the sight of this, Jasper came to life, and ran forward, jeering, “Fascist pigs, pigs, pigs. Cowards! How many of you do you need for one demonstrator?” Alice ran to catch up with him, so as to be beside him, ready to calm him down. Bert came on slowly behind, walking, not running.
The official cars came sweeping up, and before Alice, Jasper, and Bert could reach the crowd, Mrs. Thatcher had got out, and was being led quickly in. Fruit and—as Alice had hoped—eggs sailed through the air, exploding with a dull squelch. Mrs. Thatcher had gone inside.
The demonstrators began a steady chant of “Nuclear missiles out. Out, out, out. Nuclear missiles out, out, out.”
They kept it up bravely. Mrs. Thatcher