The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [123]
Pat sobered, and said, “Alice, I keep telling you, I am serious, unlike those two bloody lunatics of ours.”
And with this she kissed Alice, tears in her eyes, and went off, running, to the tube. Out—Alice could see—of her life.
Alice slept on this, too, but did not feel enlightened when she woke in the morning. Perhaps she did not want to be.
She seemed to have lost impetus, did not feel like doing anything. Joan Robbins was in her garden. Alice stood talking with her for a time. Among other things, she learned that the two houses had been empty for six years. “Well, not exactly empty,” said Joan Robbins, embarrassed; and went on to talk of the people who had been there before the Council had commandeered the homes, families with children, grandparents, many visitors. They had been keen gardeners; the two gardens had been wonderful.
Soon some kind of social worker arrived and brought the old lady down to sit in the garden. Alice talked to her, too. As always when she stepped out of her own life, into the world of ordinary people, she felt divided, confused. Thus had she felt all the time she lived with Jasper in her mother’s house; it was why she had not wanted to stay there, was always pressing Jasper to leave. Now, after weeks with her own kind, comrades of one sort or another, her belief that her kind of life was the only one (for her now, for everybody later) was strengthened. Joan Robbins seemed to her pathetic, fussing over her clematis with fungicides and sprays; the old woman was half demented, and driving Joan Robbins crazy with continual demands. Alice, thinking firmly, “Life simply oughtn’t to be like this!,” went back to number 43, and there on the doorstep was Caroline from next door. She had a packet for Alice. She handed it over, said no, she wouldn’t come in, and went off to the bus stop. Alice looked into the packet. It was money. Inside the hall she quickly counted it. Five hundred. With a note from Muriel, saying, “Comrade Andrew said this was for you.”
Alice slid the packet into her sleeping bag, and went to number 45. As she arrived, Muriel was coming out, with a suitcase. But at first Alice did not recognise her.
She saw then that Muriel was not happy to see her, that she had probably counted on going off before Alice got there.
Alice said, “I must talk to you.”
Muriel said, “I don’t think I have got anything to say.”
They went quickly into the room used by Comrade Andrew, which had become a bedroom, for there were four sleeping bags arranged along the wall.
Muriel stood in the centre of the room, waiting for Alice to get on with it. Her suitcase stood beside her.
Muriel was not wearing battle dress today, or anything like it, but a very well cut linen suit in blue. From Harrods. Alice had seen it there the day before yesterday.
Muriel had her hair in the Princess Diana sheepdog cut.
Alice knew that Muriel was an upper-class girl and this was why she disliked her so much. She, like all her kind, had this decisive putting-down manner, implicit in every word and glance. Alice, at her democratic progressive school, which was full of such girls, had decided in the first week that she loathed them and always would.
Another thought well to the forefront of her mind was that Comrade Andrew had had an affair with Muriel because of the attraction of such girls for working-class people who professed to despise them.
“Why did Comrade Andrew leave this money for me?”
“It is nothing to do with me. Nothing at all,” said Muriel, as cuttingly and definitively as Alice expected.
“He must have said something.”
The two young women were standing facing each other in the large room, full of light, and also of traffic noise from the main road.
“Damn this bloody traffic,” said Muriel, and went to the windows, one, two, three, shutting each with a slam.
She returned to stand opposite Alice, having in the interval (which was why she had gone to the windows) made up her mind what to say.
Alice forestalled her with, “What am I supposed to do in return?”
At this Comrade Muriel showed