The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [30]
But she knew the right things to say. Now she remarked about the book Pat was reading, “He’s a very fine humanist writer.”
Pat let Laughter in the Dark close and sat thoughtfully regarding Alice.
“Nabokov, a humanist?” she asked, and Alice saw that there was serious danger of what she dreaded more than anything, literary conversation.
“Well, I think so,” Alice insisted, with a modest smile and the air of one who was prepared to defend an unpopular position reached after long thought. “He really cares about people.”
Somebody—some comrade, at some time, in some squat or other—had said as a joke, “When in doubt, classify them as humanists.”
Pat’s steady, interested, thoughtful look was reminding Alice of something. Of someone. Yes, Zoë Devlin. Thus she would regard Alice when the subject of literature came up and Alice had had no alternative but to make a contribution.
Suddenly, Alice remembered something. Zoë Devlin. Yes.
A quarrel, or at least an argument between Dorothy Mellings and Zoë Devlin. Recently. Not long before Alice left.
Alice was concentrating so hard on what she remembered that she slowly sat down, hardly noticing what she did, and forgetting about Pat.
Her mother had wanted Zoë to read some book or other and Zoë said no, she thought its view of politics was reactionary.
“How do you know when you haven’t read it?” Dorothy had asked, laughing.
“There are lots of books like that, aren’t there,” Zoë had said. “Probably written by the CIA.”
“Zoë,” had said Dorothy Mellings, no longer laughing, “is that you? Is that Zoë Devlin speaking? My good friend the fearless, the open-minded, the incorruptible Zoë Devlin?”
“I hope it is,” said Zoë, laughing.
“I hope it is, too,” said Dorothy, not laughing. “Do we still have anything in common, do you think?”
“Oh, go on, Dorothy, let up, do. I don’t want to quarrel even if you do.”
“You are not prepared to quarrel about anything so unimportant as a book? As a view of life?”
Zoë had made a joke of it all. Had soon left. Had she been back to the house again? Of course, she must have, she had been in and out of that house for … since before Alice was born.
Zoë was one of Alice’s “aunties,” like Theresa.
Why had Alice not thought of going to her for money? Wait, there was something there, at the back of her mind—what? Yes, there had been this flaming row, terrible, between Dorothy and Zoë. Yes, recently, good Christ, not more than a week or so ago. Only one row? No, more. A lot.
Dorothy had said Zoë was soft-centred, like a cream chocolate.
They had screamed at each other. Zoë had gone running out. She—Alice—had screamed at her mother, “You aren’t going to have any friends if you go on like this.”
Alice was feeling sick. Very. She was going to vomit if she wasn’t careful. She sat, very still, eyes squeezed tight, concentrating on not being sick.
She heard Pat’s voice. “Alice. Alice. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, in a hurried, low voice, still concentrating, “it’s all right.” In a minute or two she opened her eyes and said, normally, and as though nothing at all had happened, “I am afraid of the police crashing in suddenly.” This was what she had come to say.
“The police? Why, what do you mean?”
“We’ve got to decide. We have to make a decision. Suppose they come crashing in.”
“We’ve survived it before.”
“No, I mean, those pails, all those pails. We daren’t empty them into the system. Not all at once. We daren’t. God knows what the pipes are like down there where we can’t see them. If we empty them one at a time, one a day let’s say, it’ll take forever. But if we dug a pit …”