The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [167]
“No, I don’t want to,” said Alice. “I’m not going to live that kind of life. I’m not going to sit in an office nine to five.”
Suddenly wild with exasperation, with loss, with incomprehension, Dorothy cried out, “Oh, I did so want something decent for you, Alice. I had no proper education, as you know—God knows I dinned it into you.… I was married when I was nineteen. There should be a law against it. And then I just kept house and looked after you and your brother and cooked and cooked and cooked. I am unemployable. I used to sit there, when you and your brother were babies, thinking how my friends were all making something of themselves. And I was stuck. Do you remember Rosemary Holmes? Did you know she’s at Bart’s? She’s a world specialist, in something to do with the liver. There you are, I am so ignorant, I don’t even know what. We were at school together. But she went to university.”
This wild loose emotion of her mother’s was having the effect of tightening Alice up, making her feel prim and disapproving. Seeing her mother getting tight, at parties or otherwise, was the main reason why Alice never drank. There had always been a point, when Dorothy drank, where some awful malevolence spilled out of her, like a vicious chemical, burning everything it touched. But the destructiveness that once had jetted out of her only when she was drunk, as if from an overpressured container kept in some corner deep inside her, seemed now to have taken her over, so that nothing was safe from her sarcastic hostility: not her children, her friends, her former husband, or anything in her past.
Alice thought, as she watched Dorothy staring with heavy sorrowful eyes into some lost opportunity or other, Well, what does she think she should have been, then?
Dorothy said, “I would have been a good doctor, I know. You know what you would have been good at. I’d have been a good farmer, too. And an explorer.”
“An explorer!” jeered Alice feebly, and Dorothy said, “Yes, an explorer.” Her glass was empty. She got up, went to the shelf, poured another liberal dose of whisky, sat down. She was not looking at Alice. “I haven’t done anything with my life.” She was even smiling, contemptuous, as she negated Alice in this way. “I used to look at you when you were little, and I thought, Well, at least I’ll make sure that Alice gets educated, she’ll be equipped. I won’t have Alice stuck in my position, no qualifications for anything. But it turned out that you spend your life exactly as I did. Cooking and nannying for other people. An all-purpose female drudge.” She laughed bitterly, demolishing all the lovely years Alice thought about so longingly, killing the old Dorothy Mellings who shed warmth everywhere, people coming to her, surrounding her, wanting what she had—the gift of filling everything about her with life.
Alice was hurt beyond speaking, sat in a dwarfed, shrinking position, listening as her mother went on: “This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there’s a layer of people who run everything. But we—we’re just peasants. We don’t understand what’s going on, and we can’t do anything.”
Alice found she was becoming herself again. “Don’t be silly, we can do anything we like.”
“Oh, you, running about playing at revolutions, playing little games, thinking you’re important. You’re just peasants, you’ll never do anything.”
“You don’t understand, Mother,” said Alice, calm and confident. “We are going to pull everything down. All of it. This shitty rubbish we live in. It’s all coming down. And then you’ll see.”
This brought Dorothy back to herself. Her dry watchfulness returned, she set a distance between herself and her daughter; her green eyes again seemed like stones, and she said, “And then you are going to build it all up again