The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [29]
“How many of you are there?” she asked in a hurried, playing-for-time way, glancing at the note and then making herself confront Alice’s face, that face which could not be denied. It was not fair! Mrs. Whitfield seemed to be feeling. They were inappropriate and wrong, these emotions that Alice had brought into this orderly and sensible office. Probably what Mrs. Whitfield should be doing was to tell Alice to go away and come back better supplied with evidence of her status as a citizen. Mrs. Whitfield could not do this. She could not. Alice saw from the way that large smooth confined bosom heaved, from the soft flushed shocked face, that she—Alice—was on the point of getting her way.
“Very well,” said Mrs. Whitfield at last, and sat for a moment, not so much in doubt now that she had made a decision, but worried. For Alice. “Those are big houses,” she remarked, meaning: they use a lot of electricity.
“It’ll be all right,” said Alice, sure that it would be. “Can you switch it on this afternoon? We have got an electrician at work. It would be a help.…”
Mrs. Whitfield nodded. Alice went out, knowing that the official was watching her go, disturbed, probably already wondering why she had given in.
Instead of going straight home, Alice went to the telephone box at the corner and dialled her mother. A voice she did not at first recognise; but it was her mother. That awful flat voice … Alice nearly said, “Hello, this is Alice,” but could not. She gently replaced the receiver and dialled her father. But it was his partner who answered.
She bought a large Thermos (which would always be useful, for example on demos or at pickets), asked Fred’s wife to fill it with strong tea, and went home.
The white dusty cloud in the kitchen had subsided. She said to Philip, now crouched on the floor with half the floorboards up, “Be careful, they might switch it on at any moment.”
“It is on, I’ve just tested,” said Philip, and gave her a smile that made it all worthwhile.
They sat on the great table, drank strong tea, and were companionable and happy. It was a large room. Once a family had had its centre here, warm and safe and unfailing. They had sat together around this table. But Alice knew that before all that could begin again, there must be money.
She left Philip and went to the sitting room, where Pat was awake and no longer lying abandoned and open to Alice’s anxious curiosities. She was reading. It was a novel. By some Russian. Alice knew the author’s name as she did know the names of authors—that is, as if they were objects on a shelf, round, hard, and glittering, with a life and a light of their own. Like marbles, which, though you could turn them between your fingers for as long as you liked, would not yield, give up their secrets, submit.
Alice never read anything but newspapers.
As a child she had been teased: Alice has a block against books. She was a late reader, not something to be overlooked in that bookish house. Her parents, particularly her mother, all the visitors, everyone she ever met had read everything. They never stopped reading. Books flowed in and out of the house in tides. “They breed on the shelves,” her parents, and then her brother, happily joked. But Alice was cherishing her block. It was a world she could choose not to enter. One might politely refuse. She persisted, polite but firm, secretly tasting the power she possessed to disquiet her parents. “I do not see the point of all that reading,” she had said; and continued to say, even at university, doing Politics and Economics, mainly because the books she would be expected to read did not have the inaccessible, mocking quality of those others. “I am only interested in facts,” she would say during this period when there was no escaping it: a minimum number of books had to be read.
But later she had learned she could not say this. There had always been books of all kinds in the squats and