The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [84]
“Why is it? I haven’t had a job since I left university. I’ve done all right.”
This caused a check or hitch in the flow of their talk; he was suppressing a need to expostulate. There’s a lot bourgeois about him, she was thinking, but only mildly critical because of her now established respect for him.
Jasper—but he simply would not talk about Jasper. Because, she thought, of her link with him. She didn’t have to ask, though: Comrade Andrew did not have much time for Jasper. Well, he’d see!
Roberta and Faye. He asked many questions about them, but what interested him was their lesbianism. Not out of prurience, or anything Alice could dislike: there was a total noncomprehension there. He simply had no idea of it. No experience, ever, Alice guessed. He wanted to know what the women’s commune was like that Roberta and Faye frequented. What the connection was between lesbians and the revolutionary formulations of the political women. Alice offered pamphlets and books, which she would procure for him. He nodded, but pressed on: how did women like Faye and Roberta see the relations between men and women after the revolution? Alice suppressed an impulse to say: Liquidate all men. She was remembering long and hot arguments with Molly and Helen in Liverpool, during which she, Alice, had said that their attitude amounted to a contempt for men so total that in effect they suppressed all serious thought about them.
What Alice said was, “There are many different formulations in the Women’s Movement. I would say that Faye and Roberta represent an extreme.”
Then there were Mary and Reggie; and, as she expected, Comrade Andrew refused to dismiss them as she wanted to. Precisely what she disliked most about them was what interested him: she knew that he wondered whether they could be persuaded to become sleeping partners in the revolution, a phrase that she used and he approved with a dry smile and a nod.
Alice didn’t know. She doubted it. They were naturally conservers. (Not that she had anything against Greenpeace. On the contrary.) They were, in short, bourgeois. In her view, Andrew should discuss it with them. She could not answer for them.
This, she knew, cut across the underlying premise of the conversation: that she was willingly acting as his aide in assessing possible recruits. For something or other. Not stated. Understood.
Did they plan—number 43—to take in more members of their squat or commune?
“Why not? There’s plenty of room.”
“I agree, the more the better.”
And so the talk went on, reaching back, for some rather tense minutes, to her childhood. Alice’s mother did not really interest Comrade Andrew, but Cedric Mellings, that was a different matter. How big was his business? How many employees? What were they like?
Alice’s brother: Alice decided not to say Humphrey worked in a top airline firm. “Oh, don’t waste your time on him,” she said.
More cups of coffee, and some rather satisfying talk about the state of Britain. Rotten as a bad apple, and ready for the bulldozers of history.
When Alice said she had to go, she was expecting Jasper, and stood up, Andrew did, too, and seemed to hesitate. Then he said quickly, for the first time sounding awkward, “You have been with Jasper a long time, haven’t you?”
“Fifteen years.” Knowing what was coming, recognising it from many such moments in the past, she turned to go. He was beside her, and she felt his arm lightly about her shoulders.
“Comrade Alice,” he said. “It’s not easy to understand … why you choose such a … relationship.”
The usual ration of affront, resentment, even anger was in her. But this was Comrade