The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [168]
Alice was going to burst, she was so furious, standing there, fists clenched, face working and red.
“Oh, God, Alice,” said Dorothy Mellings, “do go away. I’m just fed up with you, can’t you see that? I just can’t be bothered with you.”
Alice shrieked, “You’ll see, you shitty old fascist. You and your fascist friends. That’s all you care about.…” She was incoherent, panting, sweating. “But you just wait. Everything is rotten. It’s all undermined. But you’re so dozy and stupid and you can’t even see it. We are going to pull it all down.” And she even came over to her mother and gave her a push on the shoulder, so that Dorothy had to hold on to the table edge. “You’ll all see,” Alice yelled finally, and ran out of the room, slamming the door.
Fuelled by an anguish of rage, Alice dashed down the stairs and then the street, turned a corner, and became part of the thin late crowd dispersing from the Underground. A block away, two strolling policemen approached, and Alice became at once the good citizen coming home after an evening’s fun. She knew one of the policemen. He had been on that very first raid. He did not know her. She nodded at him, and smiled, ratepayer who paid his wages. He said, “Good evening.”
Well, they had orders to fraternise, thought Alice, allowing her face, her body, to scorn him, once safely past. But her real anger had gone into her pounding race along the pavement. Now she was thinking of her mother with a strong protective pity. Two shitty little rooms! Dorothy looked so big in that sitting room; if she turned too quickly she might knock a wall down. Spending her evenings talking to Zoë Devlin and reading books! Alice now examined, from a stored mental picture, titles from the two tidy little strips of shelves up the walls, and from the pile of books on the floor by the big chair. What did she want to read that kind of book for! She might just as well still be at school. When Zoë Devlin came to spend the evening they sat opposite each other and talked about life. No. About books. No, of course, they had that row. Well, that was ridiculous; they’d have to make it up; they’d been like sisters; they said so themselves. A stupid shitty row … well, quite a lot of quarrels, really.
Alice was standing on the pavement, like a child playing statues, apparently waiting for a taxi or to be given a lift. She was—unwillingly—seeing the scene of that dreadful final row between her mother and Zoë. It was in the old sitting room, on the first floor, which stretched from front to back and from side to side of the old house, windows all round, and through the windows views of garden and trees. Dorothy Mellings and Zoë faced each other, pale, too serious to shout or insult each other, as they had done before, but then always made it up, laughing. Two tall strong handsome elderly women, with the lovely room stretching away all around them to the windows, and, beyond them, the gardens.
Alice’s vision seemed to shift. Two old women. Ancient. They both looked so battered and beaten. Alice felt their being old as an affront to her. How had they got like this so quickly? Why had they? Why had they let it happen? Why didn’t they care? Didn’t they see how ridiculous they were, taking themselves so seriously?
Three days before that, these two women had broken off an argument, saying that if they did not, they would start hitting each other.
On that occasion, Dorothy had said, “You and I met on the Aldermaston marches. We met because of our political attitudes. That is what we had in common.”
Zoë had