The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [154]
He was so angry. Ought he to be so angry? He was white, not red, a leaden white, with the effort—she supposed—of holding himself in, the effort of not hitting her. Of not killing her. She knew that was it.
She should not have said, in that casual way, “rubbish dump,” that the stuff was on the rubbish tip. Yes, that had been foolish. Hasty. Perhaps even now she should say, No, I was joking, the cases are upstairs. But if she did, he would go upstairs and find Jocelin at work, and then …
She felt she might faint, or even begin to weep. She could feel tears filling her, beginning to press and exude everywhere over her body.
He said, “I am by myself. I have a car. I need someone—better, two people—to go out to this place and get the packages.”
“Oh,” she said, breathlessly, her voice sounding weak and silly. “I shouldn’t do that. Not in full daylight. There might be people there. Rubbish vans emptying rubbish, for a start. It would be dangerous.”
“It would be dangerous?” he enquired. Again she felt he might easily kill her, do something he could not stop himself from doing. “We can’t have that lying around on a rubbish dump,” he said.
“Why not? Have you ever seen one? It’s full of all kinds of stuff. Acres of it. A couple of ordinary brown packages wouldn’t be noticed much.” She was beginning to feel better again, she noted.
“Two new, large, unopened packages?” he enquired, his face close to hers, eyes quite dislocated with anger.
“All the same, I’d wait till tonight.”
“I’m not waiting till tonight. Get two people down here. Men. There are men in the house, aren’t there?”
She said, cold, almost herself again, “I and another girl carried the cases”—she was going to say “upstairs,” but caught herself in time—“to the car.”
“Then two women. It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does matter,” she informed him. “Don’t give us orders. Don’t you understand, you can’t give us orders, we aren’t Russians.”
Her eyes were shut, not so much because she did not feel well (in fact, she felt better) as because she could sense his hatred for her enclose her. Well, that was it, she was going to be killed. A movement, the sounds of footsteps; she opened her eyes and saw him going off. But at the door he stopped and turned and said very quietly, with an extraordinary intensity of contempt, of personal dislike, “Don’t imagine that this is the end of it, Comrade Mellings. It is not the end, far from it. You can’t play little games with us like that, you’ll see, Comrade Mellings.” And his face convulsed briefly, in that movement of cheeks and tongue which if continued would have ended in the action of spitting. And he stood with eyes narrowed, staring at her, determined to mark her, force her down, with the strength of what he felt.
And now this was the man himself, absolutely what he was. She knew this, knew she saw him. This was not the smoothie, the conforming spy who had been taught to control every movement, gesture, look; but something behind that. This was power. Not fantasies about power, little games with it, envy of it, but power itself. He embodied the certitudes of strength, of being utterly and completely in the right. He knew himself to be superior, dominant, in control. Above all, in the right.
He went out, shutting the door—she noted—gently. No loud bangs that might alert neighbours.
She went swiftly to the sink and was sick.
Tidily she swirled away all that nastiness, scrubbing and cleaning, though she had to hold on with one hand, her knees were so weak. She took herself, actually staggering, to the lavatory, for terror, it seemed, sat in her bowels. She came back, holding on to door edges and door handles, to the kitchen, where she collapsed on the table, face down, arms sprawled