The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [166]
“Quite so. Shit. But there were two reasons I wouldn’t have changed my mind, even if Cedric had changed his. For one thing, I wanted to be rid of all that. You did me a great service, Alice. There was a time I could have wrung your neck—I felt like a visitor in my own house; I could hardly go into my own kitchen—then suddenly I thought, My God, what a release! I am free of all that. Who said I had to spend my life buying food and cooking it? Years, years of my life I’ve spent, staggering around with loads of food and cooking it and serving it to a lot of greedy-guts who eat too much anyway.”
Here Alice’s sound of protest was like a moan, and she stared with frantic eyes at her mother: stop, please stop, before you destroy everything, even the memories of our lovely house.
But this dangerous, destructive force that was now her mother did not hear her, or decided to take no notice, for she was going on, in a hard, cold, but amused voice, as if nothing, but nothing, was to be taken seriously. “And the other reason was, there was this fantastic deal: those Germans—what’s their name? You know, you spoke to them—wanted to buy the house as it stood with carpets and curtains—the lot. But I had to get out fast to fit their schedule. And you and Jasper wouldn’t get out, no matter what I said.” Here Dorothy Mellings put her head back and laughed, while Alice, eyes wide, knuckles of her left hand between her teeth—she would have toothmarks there—sat looking as if she would simply dissolve in front of her mother’s eyes in a puddle of tears. “Then Cedric rang Jasper up and said if he didn’t get out, the police would be called in. Then, thank God, you left, and I had the estate agent hounding me to get the place ready. The next thing was, as soon as the house was cleaned up, some joker got in and stole every stitch of curtain.” She rocked with laughter. It was the kind of laughter she shared with Zoë Devlin, certainly, but it was not being shared with Alice. “Not a bloody curtain left. With the what’s-their-names coming in in four days. They were livid. They had contracted for curtains, and curtains they were going to have! The deal was off!” Here Dorothy had another good swallow of Scotch. “I lost the flat I was going into: I had to tell them what had happened. They were nice about it, but they couldn’t wait. It was a good flat, but actually I am pleased. It was too big for me. I really need something this size. I wanted to be done with it all.”
Hearing, correctly, “I wanted to be done with you,” Alice felt her eyes at last fill with tears which ran down her face.
“Some people from Yorkshire took the house, without curtains. For two thousand less, but by then I was past caring. This flat was available. It’s fine. The simpler the better. When I think, the years of my life I’ve spent fussing.”
Alice said in a doleful little voice, “I am sorry I took the rug.”
“Oh yes, so you did. Well, as it happens, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have room for it anyway, so you might as well have it.”
Alice snuffled and sniffed, and then said, “I am sorry I called you a fascist.”
“Wha-a-at?” Dorothy seemed incredulous. “A fascist, did you? Well, well. And what about all the other things. A fascist. Who cares about your naughty little swearwords.”
“What did I say? I didn’t …” Somewhere at the back of Alice’s mind there still reverberated that parting scene when she had screamed abuse at her mother, and so had Jasper. Incandescent, she had been. Molten with rage.
“Are you still with Jasper?” demanded Dorothy.
Another Alice, all rectitude and certainty, banished the snuffling child. “Of course. I am with Jasper. You know that.”
“Oh, God, Alice,” said Dorothy Mellings, suddenly offering her daughter the simple warm sincerity that was what Alice remembered of her mother, particularly of the last four years in her house, and for which she had been starving. “Oh, God, why don’t you get a job? Do something?”
“You seem to have overlooked the fact that we have over three million unemployed,” said Alice self-righteously.
“Oh, rubbish. You