The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [38]
Alice ran into the hall and up the stairs, thinking that if her father was late today going to work—only he never was—she would say: Oh, hello, Dad, there you are! She opened the door into their bedroom calmly, and saw, as she expected, the large marriage bed, which had on it thrown-back duvets, and Jane’s nightdress (scarlet silk, Alice noted, severely), her father’s pyjamas, a child’s striped woolly ball, and a teddy bear.
She went straight to the sliding doors behind which her father’s clothes were hanging. Neatly: her father was a methodical man. She went through his pockets, knowing she would find something, for it had been a joke, in their house, that Dorothy Mellings found money in his pockets, and made a point of using it on luxuries. He would say—Alice’s father—“Right, come clean, what have you spent it on?” And Alice’s mother would say, “Brandied peaches.” Or marrons glacés, or Glenfiddich whisky.
Alice’s hands darted in and out of the pockets and she was praying, Dear God, let there be some money, let there be, let there be a lot. Her fingers felt a soft thick wad and she brought it out, not believing in her luck. A thick soft pack of notes. Ten-pound notes. She slid them into her breast pocket, and was out of the room, down the stairs, and then through the kitchen into the back garden. She hardly paused to see whether Jane was safely looking the other way. Alice knew she would be.
Alice was out of the house and in the road and then out of sight of the house in a minute. There she stood, back to the road, facing into a tall hedge, and counted the notes. She could not believe it. It was true. Three hundred pounds.
Well, he would miss that sum: it wasn’t just a jar of fucking bloody ginger, or peaches. Three hundred pounds: he would think she had stolen it—Jane had. Let him. A cold sour pleasure filled Alice, and she slid the notes back and began running. The dustmen!
Three-quarters of an hour after she had left, she was back at the house, and she saw the rubbish van turn in from the main road.
She knew, she knew that all would go well, and stood smiling, her pounding heart sending the blood hissing through her ears.
From the rubbish van jumped the same three men, who, having acknowledged her there, began to hump the black shining sacks. Not a word about the rain that squelched in the sacks with the rubbish.
It took them twenty minutes or so, by which time Joan Robbins had come out to stand at her door, arms folded, watching. And who else was watching? Alice did not look, but made a point of going to the hedge to speak to Joan Robbins and smile: neighbours and a little gossip, that’s what observers would see; and then she stood at the gate from which the last black bag had been taken, and put into the hand of Alan the driver the sum of fifteen pounds, with the smile of a householder. And went indoors. It was just after ten in the morning. And the day lay ahead, and it would be filled every minute, with useful activity. It would, once she had started. For she had run out of steam. Now she was thinking of them, her friends, her family, who would by now be down at the Melstead works, would have blended with the others, would be standing taking the measure of the police, would be walking confidently about, exchanging remarks the police would have to hear and ignore—ignore until they got their own back later.
Bert and Jasper and Pat, Jim and Philip, Roberta and Faye—she hoped those two would be careful. Well, they were all politically mature; they would know how far they could go. Jasper? Jasper had not been in a confrontation for a long time; for one thing, he had only just finished being bound over. It was not that she wanted him safe, but that she wanted things done right. Jasper was wild, had been bound over once for two years, and not for anything useful—as she judged it—but