The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [18]
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Please.”
He nodded, and in a moment had slipped out the front door and was gone. When she went into the sitting room, where Jasper and Bert were, waiting—as they showed by how they sat, passive and trusting—for her to accomplish miracles, she said with confidence, “He’s gone to get some tools. He’ll be back.”
She knew he would; and within the hour he was, with a bag of tools, the kango, battery, lights, everything.
The concrete in the bowl, years old, was shrinking from the sides and was soon broken up. Then, scratched and discoloured, the lavatory stood usable. Usable if the water still ran. But a lump of concrete entombed the main water tap. Gently, tenderly, Philip cracked off this shell with his jumping, jittering, noisy drill, and the tap appeared, glistening with newness. Philip and Alice, laughing and triumphant, stood close together over the newly born tap.
“I’ll see that all the taps are off, but leave one on,” she said softly; for she wanted to make sure of it all before announcing victory to those two who waited, talking politics, in the sitting room. She ran over the house checking taps, came running down. “After four years, if there’s not an airlock …” She appealed to Philip. He turned the main tap. Immediately a juddering and thudding began in the pipes, and she said, “Good. They’re alive.” And he went off to check the tanks while she stood in the hall, thankful tears running down her cheeks.
In a couple of hours, the water was restored, the three lavatories cleared, and in the hall was a group of disbelieving and jubilant communards who, returning from various parts of London, had been told what was going on and, on the whole, disbelieved. Out of—Alice hoped—shame.
Jim said, “But we could have done it before, we could have done it.” Rueful, incredulous, joyful, he said, “I’ll bring down the pails, we can get rid of …”
“Wait,” screamed Alice. “No, one at a time, not all at once; we’ll block the whole system, after years, who knows how long? We did that once in Birmingham, put too much all at once in—there was a cracked pipe underneath somewhere, and we had to leave that squat next day. We had only just come.” In command of them, and of herself, Alice stood on the bottom step of the stairs, exhausted, dirty, covered with grime and grey from the disintegrating concrete, even to her hair, which was grey. They cheered her, meaning it, but there was mockery, too. And there was a warning, which she did not hear, or care about.
“Philip,” she was saying, “Philip, we’ve got the water, now the electricity.” And, in silence, Philip looked gently, stubbornly at her, this frail boy—no, man, for he was twenty-five, so she had learned among all the other things about him she needed to know—and suddenly they were all silent, because they had been discussing, while she and Philip worked, how much this was going to cost and how much they would contribute.
Philip said, “If you had called in a plumber, do you know what you would have had to pay?”
“A couple of hundred,” supplied Pat, tentatively, who, without interfering in this delicate operation—Alice and Philip and the house—had been more involved than the others, following the stages of the work as they were accomplished, and commenting, telling how thus she, too, had done in this place and that.
Alice took the fifty pounds from her pocket and gave them to Philip.
“I’ll get my Social day after tomorrow,” she said. He stood, turning over the notes, five of them, thinking, she knew, that this was a familiar position for him to be in. Then he looked up, smiled at her, and said briefly, “I’ll come in tomorrow morning. I need to do the electrics in daylight.”
And he left, accompanied not by his mate, Bert, who had brought him here, but by Alice, and she went with him to the gate, the rubbish malodorous around them.
He said, with his sweet, painful