The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [21]
They came here every morning after three or four hours’ stint in the offices. These men came in on their way to work. They all knew one another, Alice could see; it was like a club. She finished up quickly and left. Outside the newsagent’s on the corner, the two women she had been sitting with had been joined by a third. They all wore shapeless trousers, blouses, and cardigans and carried heavy shopping bags. Their work gear. They stood together gossiping, taking up as little room as they could, because the full tide of the morning rush to work filled the pavements.
It was still too early. It was only just after eight. Her mother would be taking her bath. If Alice went there now she could quietly let herself in and make the coffee, to give her mother a surprise when she came down in her dressing gown. Then they could sit at the big table in the kitchen and eat their muesli and drink their coffee. Dorothy would read her Times, and she, the Guardian. To that house every day were delivered the Times, the Guardian, the Morning Star, and the Socialist Worker, the last two for herself and Jasper. Jasper said he read the Worker because one should know what the opposition was doing; but Alice knew that he secretly had Trotskyist tendencies. Not that she minded about that; she believed that socialists of all persuasions should pull together for the common good. In her mother’s house, she read the Guardian. For years, that newspaper had been the only one to be seen. Then, one day, her mother dropped in to visit her great friend Zoë Devlin and found her wearing a Guardian apron; the word “Guardian” was printed in various sizes of black print, on white. This had given Dorothy Mellings a shock; she had a revelation because of this sight, she had said. That Zoë Devlin, of all people in the world, should be willing to put herself into uniform, to proclaim conformity!
It was the beginning of her mother’s period of pretty farfetched utterances—a period by no means over. The beginning, too, of a series of meetings arranged between the two women for the purpose of re-examining what they thought. “We go along for decades,” Alice had heard her mother say on the telephone, initiating the first discussion, “taking it for granted we agree about things, and we don’t. Like hell we do! We’re going to have to decide if you and I have anything in common, Zoë, how about it?”
Typical intellectual shit, Jasper had opined, meaning Dorothy to hear it.
Remembering Jasper, Alice understood she could not just turn up now, make coffee, and greet her mother with a smile.
She got on the train and found another café, where no one would think her remarkable. It was nearly empty; its busy time would not start for another two hours, when shoppers, men and women, came in. Now Alice ate wholemeal buns and honey and was restored to grace, and, with an eye on the clock on the wall, bided her time. Her mother would probably go out to the shops about nine-thirty, ten. She liked to get shopping over, for she hated it.
Alice had done the shopping for four years. She loved it. When she returned to the great kitchen with cartons full of food brought back in the car, she would carefully put everything away. Her mother would probably be there (if Jasper wasn’t) and they would talk, getting on like anything! They always did! At home Alice was a good girl, a good daughter, as she had always enjoyed being. It