The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [92]
Your daughter, Alice.
P.S. And there is a husband, too.
She went in and sat on the bottom step of the staircase. Sat there for a long time, her mind blank. Then she began a curious movement, rubbing her hand over her face, as though feeling for something or wanting something. It was quite a hard movement, dragging the flesh this way and that, and it went on for some time, perhaps ten minutes. A task she had to perform, a necessity; an observer could have thought she had been ordered to do this, to sit on that step with her fingers pushing her flesh about over her face.
Then she methodically collected her bag, and went off to the Underground, walked up the streets to her mother’s house, and stood outside it looking at the “For Sale” sign. She could not take it in. Using her key, she briskly admitted herself. But inside it was as if something had sucked out furniture, leaving the spirit of the house intact. The cooker was in the kitchen, though the refrigerator was gone. Curtains hung pleasantly in the windows, and it seemed that if she turned her head away and back, then the table where she had sat, where she had served her soup to her mother, sometimes to her mother’s guests, might reappear. The rest of the house was the same. In the bedrooms were the curtains she had known all her life, and the fitted carpets remained, but beds and cupboards had been spirited away. Alice went up to her room, and squatted down in the corner where her bed had been, the narrow white bed she had slept in since she was ten years old. On the window was a blue-and-red peacock she had stencilled there on a wet afternoon when the garden was blanked out with grey rain. A 1980 calendar hung on a wall; she had kept it because she liked the picture: Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère. She identified with that girl who stared out, trapped by bottles, tangerines, mirrors, the counter, a wall of people with ugly faces.
In the garden there was sunlight, and cats on a lawn that needed cutting.
She went downstairs, like a sleepwalker. Then, in a frenzy, having come awake, furious, betrayed, deadly, she tore down curtains from room after room, bundled them, and staggered out of the house, forgetting to lock the door, hardly able to walk under the load. She saw a woman looking from a window and thought: So what, they are mine, aren’t they? She managed to reach the corner, staggering. She stopped a taxi, returned in it to the house, made it wait while she ran in to drag down any other curtains that remained. Then she was driven back to the squat, where she spent all afternoon putting up her curtains where none had been, or replacing curtains for which she had no feeling. Anyway, these curtains were a thousand times better than the ones off the skips: lovely, real linen or silk or thick velvet, lined and interlined, fringed and tasselled.
How dare her mother give these away without even asking her, Alice?
When she went into the kitchen, Philip was there, and she knew from his manner that he had something to say.
It was that he had had printed a leaflet, which he was taking to hotels, restaurants, shops, advertising his firm, Philip Fowler, Builder and Decorator; that he had to get real work, soon; that he thought he had contributed more than his share to this house, which was now in working order. If “they” wanted him to do any more, then he insisted on being paid; no, of course not at the proper rates, but enough to make it worth it.
The things that still needed to be done here were: Guttering to be replaced. Also a section of exterior drainpipe (he advised that this should be done soon, because the wall was badly soaked, and they were asking for dry rot). The cold-water tank in the attic was almost rusted through. In his opinion it might burst, flooding the house at any moment. The window sills were rotten on the top floor, and were letting in rain. And of course there was the question of the two rotten beams