The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [37]
As she left the room, she was worrying—Has Jasper taken his things to another room?—and her heart seemed to give way. For if he was going to shut her out, then, with Bert here, she knew she would find it hard to keep the connection with him that was the meaning and purpose of her life. He would not leave her, she knew that; but he could seem to go very far away.
She went into the hall, now so empty and so large with no one in it, and put out the light. She went up the stairs in the dark, feeling the worn carpet slippery under her feet, and to the landing where the doors were behind which were disposed the others; Philip, too, in the little room beyond the large one Roberta and Faye had taken. Jim always slept downstairs, where his music was—and, for another thing, it was easy to jump out of a window there, and run for it, if necessary.
She opened the door into the room where, she saw with relief that made her knees go soft, Jasper lay curled against the wall, a grublike shape in the half-dark. Her sleeping bag lay on the same wall as his; he had been known, in the past, to move it. She slid straight in, fully dressed.
“Jasper?” she said.
“What is it?”
“Good night, then.”
He said nothing. They both lay quiet, listening to hear whether Pat and Bert would start up again. They did. But Alice was worn out. She fell asleep, and when she woke it was light. Jasper had gone, and she knew that they had all gone, and she was alone in the house except perhaps for Philip. She went to see. No Philip; and his tools lay near the gap in the floorboards where he had been replacing cable.
She must get money. She must.
It was nine in the morning.
She was thinking: If I talk to Mum, if I explain … But the thought sank away into a pit of dismay. She did not remember what her mother had actually said, but her empty voice, as though all life had been sucked out of her—that Alice did remember. But what is the matter with her, Alice thought indignantly, what’s she going on about?
Her father. But he must give it to me. He’s got to! This thought, too, died in her; could not maintain itself.… She found she was thinking of her father’s new house. Well, not so new; he had been there over five years, for she and Jasper had not moved in with her mother until her father had been gone for a good year or more. A new wife. Two new children. Alice stood, imagining the house, which she had been in several times. The garden: Jane. Jane Mellings, with her two pretty infants in the big green garden, full now of spring flowers and forsythia.
Alice came to life, ran downstairs, snatched up her jacket, and was out of the house and into the street, where people were starting up cars to go to work. As she ran she thought: The dustmen said they would come! But she would only be gone an hour: They won’t come so early—but how do I know? If they come and find no one there … All the same she kept on running, thinking: But they won’t come yet, I just know they won’t.
She panted into the Underground, snatched a ticket from the machine, belted down the stairs, and there was a fortuitous train. Alice was not surprised, knowing that things were going her way this morning. She fidgeted as she stood on the crowded train, ran up the stairs at the other end, ran, ran along the leafy avenues, and then she came to a stop outside her father’s house, which was no more than half a mile from her mother’s.
In the garden she saw, not at all to her surprise, Jane, her father’s new wife, sitting on the lawn, on a large red-and-green-striped blanket, with two little scraps of children, on whose fair heads the sun glistened.
Alice removed her eyes from the scene, as if her gaze might have the power to force Jane to look at her. Alice went straight up the path to the front door, found it locked, went round the house to the back. She was in full