The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [175]
At the end of twenty minutes, Jasper and Bert appeared again; she had not heard them come, though they were breathing heavily from running. In a moment the car was out of the shelter of the shrubs, and back at large in the streets. There wasn’t much traffic now. The sky was beginning to lighten. There didn’t seem to be a place to park the car anywhere. Cars filled every inch along the pavements’ edges, and again they had to drive about more than they wanted. The gauge showed well below the halfway mark. How were they to know whether it was accurate? Bert remarked that once he had for months a car with a gauge that showed nearly full when it was almost empty. At last a space, again farther away than they had hoped. They parked, and stood for a few seconds looking at the unremarkable car that was, potentially, a bomb.
They had then gone into an all-night café and eaten a meal together, though prudence should have said no: they were a noisy, noticeable group. “To hell with it,” had said Jocelin, and “Fuck that,” had said Bert.
They had come home in full daylight, at about five. No, Mary and Reggie were not yet up, which was the one thing they had been afraid of; luck stayed with them, they could not do wrong!
All this Alice learned now, while they ate her soup and some good wholemeal toast, because she had not woken until eight, and by then Mary and Reggie were up, and in the kitchen.
She felt as if she were not really a participant in this great enterprise, not considered a partner. Yet she could not say this, or even suggest it, for there was nothing specific she could take hold of to complain about. But as the six sat around that table, telling the story of the past night, or early morning, she noticed they scarcely looked at her. They were giving one another attention exactly in accordance with the roles each played: Faye and Jasper, Jocelin and Bert. Then Roberta, who was nearly as much on the outside as she, Alice, was.
Alice heard that it was Jasper who was going to drive the car into position. This did frighten her. He was not a good driver, tending to panic in an emergency. She had been taking it for granted, for some reason, that she would drive the car. She was a good driver, modest and skilful. At the least she wanted to say, “No, not Jasper, he shouldn’t do it; why not Faye? why not Roberta?” Both of them were good drivers. But her situation on the periphery of events seemed to bar her from this.
Everything had been decided, it seemed, that morning, while Mary and Reggie were out of the house fetching their van and she was at the funeral.
Jasper would drive the car. Faye would be with him because—so it seemed to Alice—she had demanded it as her right. Jocelin would go down with them now, to where the car was parked in the side street, and set the devices to go off at a time that would be chosen then, when she did it. For they were not to know exactly how long it would take them to get there, nor yet the state of the traffic. A quarter to five, they thought.
It was now that Alice learned that the bombs would be timed to go off, not set off by some electronic control. She was appalled. Every previous discussion had been in terms of Jocelin’s being somewhere close by and—able to see the state of affairs in the street and on the pavement—choosing an exact moment.
Alice asked, almost timidly, certainly having to make herself break into an animated, jokey exchange between Faye and Jasper, “But if the bombs just go off, then we aren’t going to know who’s going to be around, are we?”
At once each assumed a severe, dedicated look. She could see that this thought was in their minds, behind all the