The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [43]
“Right,” said Alice. “We’ll expect you.” And put down the receiver on him.
She raced back. She called up to Philip and Pat that the Council was coming, and on no account should they stop, because it would be a good thing for them to be seen at work up there. She ran indoors to check on sitting room, kitchen. She went upstairs to the rooms where they slept, and marvelled that Roberta and Faye’s room was a veritable bower of femininity, with dressing table, cushions, duvet on the double sleeping bag, photographs—all of it grubby, but it would make a good impression. She whisked on a skirt. Her hair, her nails. She heard a knock before she expected it and tripped down the stairs with a cool smile already adjusted on her face to open the door correctly on, “Bob Hood? I am Alice Mellings.”
“I hope those two on the roof know what they are doing?”
“I expect so. He is a builder. She is assisting him. As an amateur, but she has done it before.”
She had silenced him. Oh, you nasty little man, she was thinking behind her good-girl’s smile. You nasty little bureaucrat.
“Shall I show you downstairs first? Of course, this will give you no idea of what it was like only three days ago. For one thing, the Council workmen had filled in the lavatory bowls with concrete and ripped the electric cables out—they left them anyhow, a fire hazard.”
He said, “I have no doubt they were fulfilling their instructions.”
“You mean, they were instructed to leave the cables dangerous, and to concrete over the main water tap? I wonder if the Water Board knows about that?”
He was red, and furious. Not looking at him, she flung open one door after another downstairs, lingering over the kitchen. “The electrician had made it safe in here, but you were lucky the place didn’t go up in flames. Mary Williams said you had been over this house. How was it you didn’t notice the cables?”
Upstairs, she said, knowing that to this man anything incorrect, even so much as a mattress on a floor rather than on a bed, must forever be an affront, “Of course, you will have to take my word for it—the state of these rooms was unspeakably awful when we came, but we have only just started.”
“Unspeakably awful now,” he said huffily, looking in at the room she and Jasper slept in, the two sleeping bags like the shed skins of snakes loose against the wall.
“It’s relative. I think you will be surprised when you see it in a month’s time.”
He said, quick to take his advantage, “I told you, don’t expect anything.”
“If this house is left empty again, it will be filled to the brim with vandals and derelicts inside a week, you know that. You’re lucky to have us. It’s being put back into order, with no expense to the taxpayer.”
He did not reply to that. In silence they went through the rooms on the top floor, now sweet-smelling, the air blowing through them. He instinctively closed the windows one after another, performing the task with a fussy, virtuous, irritated little air. Like a fucking housewife, thought the smiling Alice.
They went downstairs. “Well,” he said, “I have to agree with you—there’s no reason why these houses should come down, that I can see. I’ll have to look into it.”
“Unless,” said Alice, sweet and cold, “someone was going to make a profit out of it. Did you see the article in the Guardian? ‘The Scandal of Council Housing’?”
“As it happens, I did. But it is not relevant to this case.”
“I see.”
They were at the door.
She was waiting. She deserved a capitulation; and it came. The official said, unsmiling but with his whole body expressing unwilling complicity, “I’ll put the case for you tomorrow. But I am not promising. And it is not just this house, it’s the one next door. I’m going there now.”
Again Alice had forgotten next door.
Bob Hood gone, she ran up to a little window that overlooked next door, and watched, in a rage of frustration, how the well-brushed, well-dressed, clean young man