The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [187]
And Peter Cecil? For some reason, he was different. Of course, I wouldn’t give away any names, she thought: I’d just talk very carefully, tell him the story. I’d say I was told by someone in the know, and I wanted to have his opinion.
Here various little warnings that her nerves had registered and were holding banked there till she could attend to them nearly surfaced, but retreated again. Meanwhile, she was thinking that Peter Cecil had a nice face. Yes. (She was looking at him in her mind’s eye, as he had stood there yesterday outside the door, she in a frenzy of impatience to be off.) A kind face. Not like those Russians, not at all like them, he was quite different.… And here the warnings came back, in a rush, screaming for attention, and she could no longer shut them out.
Of course Peter Cecil was not like those Russians, because he wasn’t a Russian. He was … he was MI-6 or MI-5 or XYZ or one of those bloody things, it didn’t matter. The point was, he was English, English.
At this thought, at the word, a soft sweet relief began to run through Alice, so strongly she had to recognise it and be embarrassed by it. And what of it! English or not, he was the enemy, he was—worse than the Russians—he was upper-class (Cecil, I ask you!), he was reactionary, he was a fascist. Well, not exactly a fascist, really, that was exaggerating. But English. One of us. She sat thinking about his Englishness, and what that meant, what she felt about it—that talking to him would be a very different thing from talking to those Russians, who simply got everything wrong, and that was because they didn’t know what we were really like: English. And what was the matter with feeling like this? Had they (the comrades) not decided to have no dealings with Russians, IRA Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, only with us?
As she imagined herself talking to Peter Cecil, she knew that many things would not have to be said at all, as they don’t between people from the same country, no matter how divided about certain things. (Like politics!)
But what did he want to know? Alice could not remember what had been said yesterday. Her memory was a blank except that he had asked about Andrew. (Andrew Connors? Well, why not, perhaps he really was Connors.) But what had she said? Had anything been said? No, she was sure not, everything had been so rushed, she had been in a fever, she had only wanted to get off as fast as she could. The matériel? No, was it likely she would mention that? Of course she hadn’t!
She sat on, cold, tense, frightened, trying to remember, while at the same time, the thought, He is English, was coming to her rescue. She was struggling to make her memory come to heel, to give up what it should, while she thought, He is English, he will understand.
Oh yes, Alice did know that she forgot things, but not how badly, or how often. When her mind started to dazzle and to puzzle, frantically trying to lay hold of something stable, then she always at once allowed herself—as she did now—to slide back into her childhood, where she dwelt pleasurably on some scene or other that she had smoothed and polished and painted over and over again with fresh colour until it was like walking into a story that began, “Once upon a time there was a little girl called Alice, with her mother, Dorothy. One morning Alice was in the kitchen with Dorothy, who was making her favourite pudding, apple with cinnamon and brown sugar and