The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [75]
“Why don’t you go and get some more from your fucking bloody mother, from her? Or from your father?”
She had not told him exactly where she had got all the money that had been spent so freely around this house, but of course he had guessed.
She said steadily, “I shall. When I feel I can. But I can’t now.”
He let go her wrist and stood up.
Now he is going to punish me, he’s going to take his things into another room to sleep.
A long silence, while he fidgeted disconsolately about.
“Let’s go out for a meal,” he suggested, dolefully.
“Yes, let’s.” Her spirits swooped up again, although there had been no mention of spray-painting, and he had seen the scribbled slogans on the envelope on the table.
He said, nicely, “I am sorry about not going out painting tonight, Alice. But what’s the sense? I don’t want to draw attention to myself just before something important.”
“Quite right, of course,” she said. Thinking that in years of spray-painting, of darting about near the police and taunting them with their nearness, they had been caught only when they wanted to be. That was the truth of it.
Jasper wanted to talk about the two days down at Melstead, about the pickets, the excitement of it all, the arrest, the night in the cells—and about Jack. They went to an Indian restaurant, where he talked and talked, and she listened very carefully, matching what he said with her imaginings of it all. She paid for the meal. They went into a pub and he drank his usual white wine, and she, tomato juice.
Back at the house, she waited, tense, to see whether he would take his things up to another room, but he said nothing about it, only slid into his bag with a sigh that assuaged her; it was the sigh of a child finding a safe place.
He had not said anything more about money, but now he started again. That was why he had not taken his things out.
They argued, steadily, in the dark room, while the lights whirled over the ceiling. In the end she agreed to give him the money for “Jack’s” fare. She knew that for some reason it was important for Jasper to have it from her. Essential. There always had been these moments between them when she had to give way, against reason, against sense: he simply had to win. She knew that he had a hundred pounds, probably more. Perhaps even very much more. Once he had told her, in a mood of taunting cruelty that sometimes overtook him, that he had been saving up quietly all these years, enough money “to be rid of you forever.”
This did not make any sense that she could see when she thought: but she felt the power of it.
His mother—well, Alice wasn’t going to get involved even with the thought of all that dreary psychology, but no wonder he had problems with women.
In the morning, after their breakfast coffee, he stood silently and balefully near her until she gave him the fare to Dublin. Then he said that he was going to meet Jack and talk things over. If he was not back tonight, he would be tomorrow, and she must tell Bert that they were going to Ireland on Tuesday, early.
He left. She thought: Is he going on one of his things, then—cottaging, cruising …? She believed not. He wouldn’t risk it, not with his whole soul set on the trip to Ireland. Was “Jack,” then, like him? No, she was sure not. Talking about Jack, it was how he talked about Bert, how he talked about the men with whom he had this particular relationship: admiring, dependent, you could say passive … but who was it now who set the pace, making Bert go to Ireland, making Jack take them? No, not simple at all, this younger-brother thing.
She had the whole day. Alone, you could say.
Philip had climbed up into the attic—she must go up and help him, stand by him, or he would start feeling ill again. Jim—where was Jim,