The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [82]
She went into the room, while the man shut the door, smiling at Muriel, to exclude her.
This room had been cleared of all but two of the great packages. A low folding bed stood against a wall, with a single red blanket on it. It was untidy, but, then, he had got straight out of the bed to answer the scratching. There was a pillow without a pillow slip, and the old-fashioned striped ticking looked greasy. This little scene of the bed was different from the impersonality of the rest of the room, and suggested a rank and even brutal masculinity.
Yawning, not hiding it, the man sat down on an ancient easy chair on one side of the dead fireplace. She sat opposite in another.
“I was in France,” he said easily. “Just a quick trip.”
She found herself looking covertly at the bed, which had so much the air of being from a foreign country. Or perhaps from some different moral climate, like a war, or a revolution. He saw her examining the bed. He was still waking himself up. Suddenly he rose, went to the bed, tugged up the red blanket to lie straight, hiding the ugly pillow. He sat down again.
He remarked, “I got rid of what you saw in that hole out there. It’s gone to where it can be of use.”
“Oh, good,” said Alice indifferently. The point was, he might or might not have sent, or taken, “it”; but so what? She didn’t want to know.
“You must be wondering what it was. Well, all I can say is, it is something of which a very small amount goes a very long way.”
A fine contempt was rising in Alice, because of his clumsiness. She said sternly, “In my view, the less people know about such things, the better.” Meaning, the less she knew.
His eyes narrowed and grew hard; then he stiffly smiled. “You’re right, comrade. I suppose I am off guard. I am a man who needs his sleep. Seven hours in the twenty-four, or I function less than my best.”
Alice nodded, but she was examining him critically. She was finding him unimpressive. A stocky, stubby man. His hair, cut short, was flattened here and there, like an animal’s fur when it is out of sorts. A stale breath came from him, sour, which was not only because he might have drunk too much. He should be watching his weight.
“I am glad you dropped in, Comrade Alice. I have been wanting to talk things over with you.” Here he got up and went to the desk, to look for cigarettes, and stood with his back to her, going through the business of putting one in his mouth and lighting it. This procedure, during which he seemed to be returning to himself, a quick, efficient, considered series of movements, subdued Alice’s criticism. She thought: Well, for all that, he’s the real thing; and she allowed herself to feel confidence in him.
Then began a remarkable conversation, which went on for some time; it was getting on for five when she left. She knew that he was finding out from her what he needed to know—testing her—and that he must know, surely, that she allowed this, understood that it was happening. It was a dreamy, thoughtful sort of state that she was in, passive yet alert, storing up all kinds of impressions and ideas that she would examine later.
He wanted her to sever herself from “all that lot there; you are made of much better stuff than they are”; and to embark on a career of—respectability. She was to apply for a job in a certain firm with national importance. She would get the job because he, Andrew, would