The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [81]
She allowed this thought plenty of time and scope. But Jim, no, he didn’t like it: Look how pleased he was when I started clearing up. He didn’t like all those horrible buckets up there, he just doesn’t know how to … Jim, he hasn’t got the expertise of the middle class (how often had she heard this at her mother’s house); he is helpless, he doesn’t know how things work. But Faye and Roberta—well, they aren’t middle-class, to put it mildly, but surely they … yes, they would have picked up the know-how, the expertise, so if they didn’t get things straight, it’s because they didn’t want to.
Imagine wanting to live in that room, that awful room, with walls like dung heaps, what has happened in there, what has been done in the room? Well, probably it wasn’t Roberta. Faye: anything wrong, anything pitiful and awful, would have to be Faye, never Roberta. Probably when Faye had one of those turns of hers … all kinds of awful things happening, and then Roberta, coping: Darling Faye, it’s all right; don’t, Faye; please, Faye; relax, darling.…
Alice finished the second coat at midday, washed the roller, put lids on the paint tins, took them to a room upstairs. While Philip slept, while Mary and Reggie slept, while Roberta and Faye slept (they had not come out of their room), she had painted a whole room. And done it well, no smears or skimped corners, and the papers were all bundled up ready for the dustbins, which would soon be full again.
Alice cooked herself eggs, drank tea, and washed herself in cold water, standing in the bath. Alice then, all clean and brushed, and in a nice blouse with the small pink flowers and the neat round collar, walked out of the house and went next door, to number 45, as though she had been planning to do this all day.
She was sure that Comrade Andrew would not still be in bed, whoever else was.
About two-thirds of the sacks of refuse had gone, and the pit she had seen was as if it had never been, under a litter of dead leaves where a couple of blackbirds foraged.
The door opened to show a young woman who was both tall and slender, and baggy and voluminous, for she wore battle dress in khaki and green, similar to an outfit that Alice had seen in an army-surplus shop not long ago.
“I am Alice,” she said, as the girl said, “You are Alice,” and then, “I am Muriel.” Smiling nicely, Muriel stood aside for Alice to enter a hall where not a trace remained of the stacks of pamphlets, or whatever they were. Number 45 had no carpet on the floor; otherwise the two halls were the same. There was even a broom leaning in a corner.
“Can I see Comrade Andrew?” Alice said, and Muriel replied, disappointingly, “I think he is asleep.” Seeing Alice’s commenting face, Muriel said swiftly, “But he only got back at three this morning, and those Channel boats …” Then, having given this information to which Alice felt she was not entitled, Muriel said, with a look of irritated guilt because of Alice’s critical face, that she would go and see. She went to the door of the room Alice had been in, and lifted her hand as if to knock. She scratched delicately, not to say intimately, with her forefinger. The cold and dreadful pain that she never told herself was jealousy went through Alice. She could have fainted with it. Certainly she was dizzy, and when her head cleared Muriel still stood there, complacently smiling, and scratching with that raised forefinger, like a bird’s beak. Yes, she did look like a goose, or, better still, a gosling, lumpy and unformed; like a German Royal, with a smooth,