The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [165]
“Listen, Alice. And this is for the last time. I don’t know why you don’t seem able to take it in. It’s not very complicated.” She now leaned forward, eyes fixed on Alice’s pudgy, pathetic, protesting face, and spoke slowly, spelling it all out.
“When your father left me, he said I could stay in the house. I was to have the top floor converted into a self-contained flat. I would let the flat and it would pay expenses. Rates. Electricity. Gas.” Alice nodded at this, connecting with what was being said. Encouraged, Dorothy went on, “But instead I took in you and Jasper. You wrote asking if you could come home for a bit.”
“I don’t remember anything like that. You wrote to me and said why didn’t I come home for a bit?”
“Well. Very well, Alice. As you like. I’m not going to argue. There’s no point. However it happened, you did come home. I took you and Jasper in. I told your father some people needed a long time to grow up—I was talking about you, of course. I don’t care about Jasper.”
A chill of rejection afflicted Alice. She strengthened herself, as she had done so often, to take the burden of it, on Jasper’s behalf.
“Your father kept on saying, ‘Throw them out. They are old enough to fend for themselves. I don’t see why I should have to keep that pair of scroungers.’ But I couldn’t. I couldn’t, Alice.” This last was said in a different voice, the first “nice” voice Alice had heard from her mother that evening. It was low, hurt, an appeal.
Alice felt strengthened by it and said, “Well, of course, that big house and only you in it, and your cronies coming in and out.”
Dorothy was again surprised by Alice. She peered at her daughter, the frown well established.
“It’s funny,” she said, “how you simply don’t seem to be able to take it in.” If Alice seemed unable to grasp an essential point about the situation, then Dorothy was unable to take in an essential fact about Alice. “Why can’t you?” she enquired, not of Alice but of the room, the air, something or other. “I simply cannot make you see … The point is, I would be there now, at home, if it weren’t for you and Jasper. No, Alice, I am not blaming you, I am blaming myself.” Another good gulp of Scotch. At this rate she would be tight soon. Then Alice would simply leave! She hated her mother tight; it was then she began saying all those negative things.
“And so that’s it, Alice. Though why I bother to say it all again, I can’t imagine. You are not my favourite person, Alice. I don’t particularly want to see you.”
Alice was wrestling with a difficult thought. Her face was screwed up. She bit her pink lips. She looked offended, as if Dorothy had said, “I don’t like the blouse you are wearing.”
“But when Jasper and I left, why didn’t you get the flat converted then, and let it?”
“Because,” Dorothy spelled it out, “I had spent the money Cedric gave me for converting the flat. On you. That means on Jasper, of course. Besides, since the only way I could get rid of you seemed to be to move, I had already arranged everything with the estate agent. As you know, since you were making the telephone calls …” She stopped herself, sighed. “No, of course it wasn’t that. Your father said he had had enough. That was the reason. Cedric said: Enough! And I don’t blame him.”
“Wait a minute,” said Alice, “what do you mean, I made the telephone calls?”
“Well, of course you did. You took it all on, didn’t you? Being helpful. As only you know how to be.”
“I made the calls?”
Alice could remember nothing of that. Dorothy could not believe Alice did not remember. For the thousandth time the situation was recurring where Alice said, “I don’t remember, no, you’re wrong,” thinking that her mother maliciously made things up, while Dorothy sighed and pursued interesting thoughts about the pathology of lying.
“In any case, you could have said you had changed your mind.”
This time Dorothy’s sigh was elaborate and histrionic. “In the normal world, Alice—but you wouldn’t know anything about that—there are such things as contracts.”
“Oh, shit,