The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [186]
Jocelin departed, and Alice was alone in the house.
She listened to the news again, and thought she would go out and get the newspapers. No, she would buy them when she went out to have lunch with Peter Cecil. Peter Cecil! The poor Russians, they didn’t have enough sense not to choose such an obvious name. It was almost like a joke, as if they were sending themselves up. (Here, deep inside Alice, there stirred a little uneasiness, a doubt, but she could not pin it down to anything, so suppressed it.)
It was too early to leave for the restaurant.
She sat on quietly there by herself in the silent house. In the betrayed house … She allowed her mind to move from room to room in it, praising her achievements, as if someone else had accomplished all that, but the work had not been properly acknowledged, and so she was doing it as something due to justice. The house might have been a wounded animal whose many hurts she had one by one cleaned and bandaged, and now it was well, and whole, and she was stroking it, pleased with it and herself.… Not quite whole, however; but she wasn’t going to think about what went on in the rafters. Poor house, she thought, full of tenderness, I hope someone is going to love it one day and look after it. When I leave here … It was silly to stay here, Jasper was right, but she would not leave yet, she would stay on a little longer: she felt that she could pull the walls of this house, her house, around her like a blanket, where she could snuggle, where she could feel safe.
She really did feel very peculiar, not herself at all! Well, that was only natural. She needed to go for a good long walk, or perhaps drop over for a little chat with Joan Robbins? No, there’d only be a lot of silly talk about the IRA and the bombing. Ordinary people simply didn’t understand, and it was no good expecting them to.… Here the tenderness that had been washing around the place, inside and outside her, not knowing where it belonged, fastened itself on these ordinary people, and Alice sat with tears in her eyes, thinking, “Poor things, poor things, they simply don’t understand!”—as if she had her arms around all the poor silly ordinary people in the world.
Now she began to think, but very carefully, about her parents. First, her father: no, he was too awful to waste time on, she wasn’t ever going to think about him again. Her mother … What would Dorothy say if she knew her daughter had been at the bombing? Not that Alice believed that she—Alice—had any real reason to feel bad; she hadn’t really been part of it. Alice sighed, a long shuddery breath, like a small child. This was something she could never, ever tell Dorothy, and knowing this made her feel severed from her mother as she had not done before: she might have said a final good-bye to her, instead of just having had one of their silly quarrels!
Oh no, it was all too much, it was too difficult.… Here Alice got abruptly to her feet: it looked as if she was about to walk right out of the kitchen, and after that the house; but, having stood in a stiff, arrested pose for a minute or so, she sat down again, because she had remembered Peter Cecil. (Peter Cecil, ha ha!) She couldn’t go now, because there was this lunch. But perhaps I’ll tell him all about it, she thought, he’s a professional, I can talk about the bombing without all the rights and wrongs of everything coming into it, just as a job that was done, but was bungled a bit.… Funny, she had not thought until this moment that they had messed it up. And had they? After all, if publicity was the aim, then they had certainly achieved that! And Faye? But comrades knew their lives were at risk, the moment they undertook this sort of thing, decided to become terrorists.… She could not remember a point where she had said, “I am a terrorist, I don’t mind being killed.” (Here she was again impelled to