The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [4]
“I’m Pat,” she said. “Bert told me about you two.” And then, “You are brother and sister?”
At once Jasper snapped, “No, we are not!”
But Alice liked it when people made the mistake, and she said, “People often take us for brother and sister.”
Pat examined them again. Jasper fidgeted under the look and turned away, hands in his jacket pockets, as if trying to seem indifferent to an attack.
They were both fair, with reddish gleams in hair that wanted to go into little curls and wisps. Jasper’s was cut very short; Alice’s was short and chunky and serviceable. She cut it herself. They both had pinkish freckled skin. Jasper’s little blue eyes were in round white shallows, and this gave him an angelic, candid air. He was very thin, and wore skin-tight clothes. Alice was stocky, and she had a pudgy, formless look to her. Sometimes a girl of twelve, even thirteen, before she is lit by pubescence, is as she will be in middle age. A group of women are standing on a platform in the Underground. Middle-aged women, with carrier bags, gossiping. Very short women, surely? No, they are girls, of twelve or so. Forty years of being women will boil through them and leave them as they are now, heavy and cautious, and anxious to please. Alice could seem like a fattish clumsy girl or, sometimes, about fifty, but never looked her age, which was thirty-six. Now it was a girl who returned Pat’s look with friendly curiosity from small blue-grey eyes set under sandy lashes.
“Well,” said Pat, strolling to the window to stand by Alice, “have you heard that this happy little community is for the chop?”
She looked much older than Alice, was ten years younger. She offered Alice a cigarette, which was refused, and smoked hers needfully, greedily.
“Yes, and I said, Why not negotiate with the Council?”
“I heard you. But they prefer their romantic squalour.”
“Romantic,” said Alice, disgusted.
“It does go against the grain, negotiating with the Establishment,” said Bert.
“Do you mean that this commune is breaking up?” said Jasper suddenly, sounding so like a small boy that Alice glanced quickly to see whether it had been noticed. It had: by Pat, who stood, holding her cigarette to her lips between two fingers and distancing them, then bringing them back, so that she could puff and exhale, puff and exhale. Looking at Jasper. Diagnosis.
Alice said quickly, her heart full of a familiar soft ache, on Jasper’s account, “It doesn’t go against my grain. I’ve done it often.”
“Oh, you have, have you?” said Pat. “So have I. Where?”
“In Birmingham. A group of seven of us went to the Council over a scheduled house. We paid gas and electricity and water, and we stayed there thirteen months.”
“Good for you.”
“And in Halifax, I was in a negotiated squat for six months. And when I was in digs in Manchester—that was when I was at university—there was a house full of students, nearly twenty of us. It started off as a squat, the Council came to terms, and it ended up as a student house.”
During this the two men listened, proceedings suspended. Jasper had again filled his mug. Bert indicated to Pat that the Thermos was empty, and she shook her head, listening to Alice.
“Why don’t we go to the Council?” said Alice directly to Pat.
“I would. But I’m leaving anyway.” Alice saw Bert’s body stiffen, and he sat angry and silent.
Pat said to Bert, “I told you last night I was leaving.”
Alice had understood that this was more than political. She saw that a personal relationship was breaking up because of some political thing! Every instinct repudiated this. She thought, involuntarily, What nonsense, letting politics upset a personal relationship! This was not really her belief: she would not have stood by it if challenged. But similar thoughts often did pass through her mind.
Pat said, to Bert’s half-averted face, “What the fuck did you expect? At an ordinary meeting like that—two of them from outside, we didn’t know anything about them. We don’t know anything about the couple who came last week.