The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [83]
Alice listened modestly to all this, her lids kept down.
She was thinking: And who is he? For whom would I be working? She had a good idea—but did it matter? The main point was, did she or did she not think that the whole ghastly superstructure should be brought down and got rid of, root and branch, once and for all? A clean sweep, that was what was needed. And Alice saw a landscape that had been flattened, was bare and bleak, with perhaps a little wan ash blowing over it. Yes. Get rid of the rotten superstructure to make way for better. For the new. Did it matter all that much who did the cleansing, the pulling down? Russia, Cuba, China, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, they were welcome as far as she was concerned.
But she said, after a while, in a pause that was there for her to fill, “I can’t, Andrew.” And suddenly, arising from her depths, “A bourgeois life? You want me to live a middle-class life?” And she sat there laughing at him—sneering, in fact—all alive with the energy of scorn, of contempt.
He sat facing her, no longer tired now, or stale with sleep, watching her closely. He smiled gently.
“Comrade Alice, there is nothing wrong with a comfortable life—it depends on what the aim is. You wouldn’t be living like that because of comfort, because of security”—he seemed to be making an effort to despise these words as much as she did—“but because of your aim. Our aim.”
They stared at each other. Across a gulf. Not of ideology, but of temperament, of experience. She knew, from how he had said, “there is nothing wrong with a comfortable life,” that he felt none of the revulsion she did. On the contrary, he would like such a life. She knew this about him; how? She did not know how she knew what she did about people. She just did. This man would blow up a city without five seconds’ compunction—and she did not criticise him for that—but he would insist on good whisky, eat in good restaurants, like to travel first-class. He was working-class by origin, she thought; it had come hard to him. That was why. It was not for her to criticise him.
She said, definitely, “It’s no good, Comrade Andrew. I couldn’t do it. I don’t mean the waiting—for orders—no matter how long it was.”
“I believe you,” he said, nodding.
“I wouldn’t mind how dangerous. But I couldn’t live like that. I would go mad.”
He nodded, sat silent a little. Then, sounding for the first time humorous, even whimsical, “But, Comrade Alice, I have been getting daily, sometimes hourly, reports of your transformation of that pigsty there.” The dislike he put into that word was every bit as strong as her parents’ could ever have been. Leaning forward, he took her hand, smiling humorously, and turned it so that it lay, the back upwards, in his strong square hand. Alice’s hand shrank a little, but she made it lie steady. She did not like being touched, not ever! Yet it was not so bad, his touch. The firmness of it—that made it possible. Along her knuckles, a crust of white paint.
He gently replaced her hand on her knee and said, “You’ll have the place like a palace in no time.”
“But you don’t understand. We aren’t going to live in that house as they do. We aren’t going to consume, and spend, and go soft and lie awake worrying about our pensions. We’re not like them. They’re disgusting.” Her voice was almost choked with loathing. Her face twisted with hatred.
There was a long silence, during which he decided to leave this unpromising subject. (But, thought Alice, he would not be abandoning it for long!) He offered her some coffee. There was an electric kettle, and mugs and sugar and milk on a tray on the floor. He quickly, efficiently, made coffee.
Then he began to talk about all the