The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [145]
As for his ladders and equipment, Alice said nothing about them, so they, at least, would not be sold to some dealer for a tenth of their value. They—in number 43—now at least owned their own ladders, trestles, and tools. For what that was worth; for as long as that was worth anything.
Because of Alice’s preoccupation with the disposition of Philip, the household marked time. Rather, all did save Jocelin, who was at work in an upstairs room on a variety of devices that she was concocting out of the books she referred to as “recipe books,” which gave admirable and concise advice about making explosive devices. She had purloined some of the matériel on its way through number 45. Alice, with the others, saw these devices, on Jocelin’s invitation. They were ranged on one of Philip’s trestles in a locked room—locked because of Mary and Reggie, who, though moving out in a few days, were not yet gone. What struck Alice about the things Jocelin had made was that they looked so unimportant and even flimsy, were mere assemblages of bits of this and that. Electronic devices that Jocelin was clearly proud of seemed no more portentous than those fragments of minuscule circuitry that appear when the insides of a transistor radio are broken apart.
There were also paper clips, drawing pins, a couple of cheap watches, bits of wire, household chemicals, copper tubing of various sizes, ball bearings, tin tacks, packets of plastic explosive, old-fashioned dynamite, reels of thick cotton, string.
While Jocelin worked with relish (“enjoyment” was not a word for Jocelin) at these little toys, and Alice wept over Philip—for she felt now as if she had lost an old friend, even a brother—Jasper and Bert went to some demonstrations, admonished by the others on no account to get themselves arrested, for there was important work to be done; and Roberta took Faye to stay with a friend at Brighton, because the sea air would do Faye some good. Roberta’s mother was still in a coma.
A day passed slowly. The house seemed empty. Alice found herself thinking that Roberta and Faye probably would be back that night. Would they like to be welcomed by a real meal, even a feast? While she worried about this, sitting in the kitchen with the cat, Caroline came in with carrier bags full of food. She was smooth and sleek with pleasure; she said she felt like cooking a real meal; no, Alice must sit where she was and for once allow herself to be waited on.
Until then only Alice had brought in food. Real food, that is, not a pizza or some portions of chips. Only Alice had trudged in with loads of fruit, of vegetables, had stacked the refrigerator with butter and milk, piled a cupboard with pastas and pulses. Now she sat gratefully watching Caroline, who worked smiling, full of a rich secret contentment that seemed to spill out over her, like candlelight. Alice felt meagre, dry; she did these things, cooked and fed and nurtured, but it was out of having to, a duty. She had never in her life felt what she saw brimming over in Caroline, who, as she licked a spoon to test a sauce, looked at Alice over it as though she were sharing some pleasure with her that only the rare, the initiated, of the world could even suspect. And then she lifted a spoon over to Alice, carefully, guarding—it seemed—some essence or distillation, and watched, her eyes glistening, as Alice tasted and said, “Yes, fantastic, wonderful.”
“I am a great cook,” sang or purred Caroline. “This is what I ought to be doing.…” And, because she was reminded of what she was doing, how employed, a bleakness came over her for a moment, and she was silent.
She told Alice her history. A good daughter of the middle classes, as she described herself, she saw the light—that is, that the System was rotten and needed a radical overthrow—when she was eighteen. She was in love with a young Che Guevara from the LSE, but he turned respectable on her and settled for the Labour Party. Nevertheless, he was the love of her life. When