The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [45]
They sat down. Now Mary was petitioner, Alice the judge. Alice helped with, “It is a nice house, isn’t it? Mad, to pull it down.”
Mary burst out, “Well, they are mad.” (Alice noted that “they” with a familiar dry, even resigned, amusement.) “When I opted for Housing, it was because I thought, Well, I’ll be housing people, I’ll be helping the homeless, but if I had known … Well, I’m disillusioned now, and if you knew what goes on …”
“But I do.”
“Well, then …”
Mary was blushing, eyes beseeching. “I am going to come to the point. Do you think I could come and live here? I need it. It’s not just me. We want to get married—I and my boyfriend. Reggie. He’s an industrial chemist.” This chemist bit was there to reassure her, thought Alice, with the beginnings of scorn that, however, she had to push down and out of sight. “We were just saving up to buy a flat and he lost his job. His firm closed down. So we had to let that flat go. We could live with my mother or with his parents, but … if we lived here we could save some money.…” She made herself bring it all out, hating her role as beggar; and the result of this effort was a bright determination, like a command.
But Alice was thinking, Oh, shit, no, it’s worse than I thought. What will the others say?
She played for time with, “Do you want to see the house?”
“Oh, God,” said Mary, bursting into tears. “Bob said there were rooms and rooms upstairs, all empty.”
“He’s not going to move in!” said Alice, not knowing she was going to, with such cold dislike for him that Mary stopped crying and stared.
“He’s all right, really,” she said. “It’s just his manner.”
“No,” said Alice, “it’s not just his manner.”
“I suppose not.…”
This acknowledgement of Bob’s awfulness made Alice feel friendlier, and she said gently, “Have you ever lived in a squat? No, of course you haven’t! Well, I have, in lots. You see, it’s tricky; people have to fit in.”
Mary’s bright hungry eyes—just like the poor cat’s, thought Alice—were eating up Alice’s face with the need to be what Alice wanted. “No one has ever said I am difficult to get on with,” she said, trying to sound humorous, and sighing.
“Most of the people here,” said Alice, sounding prim, “are interested in politics.”
“Who isn’t? It is everyone’s duty to be political, these days.”
“We’re socialists.”
“Well, of course.”
“Communist Centre Union,” murmured Alice.
“Communist?”
Alice thought, If she goes to that meeting tomorrow and says, They are communists … She’s quite capable of it, and with a bright democratic smile! She said, “It’s not communist, like the Communist Party of Great Britain.” Keeping her eyes firmly on Mary’s face, for she knew that what Mary saw was reassuring—unless she, Alice was wearing her look, and she was pretty sure she was not—she said firmly, “The comrades in Russia have lost their way. They lost their way a long time ago.”
“There’s no argument about that,” said Mary, with a hard brisk little contempt, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She sat restored, a pleasant ordinary girl, all brown shining curls and fresh skin. Like an advertisement for medium-quality toilet soap. But tomorrow she could decide the fate of all of them, thought Alice, curiously examining her. If she said to Bob, tomorrow morning, sharing cups of coffee before the meeting, “I dropped in last night at that house, you know, forty-three Old Mill Road, and my God, what a setup!,” then he could change his mind, just like that, particularly with the house next door in such a mess.
She asked, “Did Bob Hood say anything about next door?”
“He said there’s nothing structurally wrong.”
“Then why, why, why, why?” burst out Alice, unable to stop herself.
“The plan was to build two blocks