The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [94]
But, with luck, her father would have left at three.
To reach her father’s business, she had to go two stops further on the Underground than for her father’s house, or her mother’s—well, where her mother had been. She walked, deliberately not thinking too much, into the stationer’s, where she was greeted, the boss’s daughter. She walked through the shop, saying she wanted to see her father, then upstairs to the office floor. People were tidying their desks for the weekend. She said Hello, and How are you, and went into her father’s office, where the secretary, Jill, sat in her father’s chair, counting money from the till downstairs.
“Oh, he’s gone then,” said Alice, and sat down. Jill, counting, leafed through ten-pound notes, smiled, nodded, her mouth moving to indicate that she could not stop. Alice smiled and nodded, and got up to stand at the window, looking out. Indolent and privileged, daughter of the establishment, she leaned on the sill, watching the goings-on in the street, and listened to the sounds of paper sliding on paper.
Should she say her father had agreed she should have some money? If she did, Jill could not say no; and then, on Monday, her father, on being told, would not give her away, would not say: My daughter is a thief. She was about to say: He said I could have five hundred pounds. But then it happened, the incredible, miraculous luck that she now expected, since it happened so easily and often: in the next office the telephone rang. Jill counted on. The telephone rang and rang. “Oh, flick it,” muttered Jill daintily, for she was the kind of good girl favoured by her father as secretary, and she ran next door to the telephone. Alice saw on the desk that there was a white canvas bag in which stacks of notes had already been put. She slid her hand in, took out a thick wad, then another, put them inside her jacket, and again leaned, her back to the room, at the window. Jill returned, saying that it was Mrs. Mellings, for her father, and it took Alice some moments to realise that this must be her mother, not the new Mrs. Mellings, who at this moment would be already on her way to the pleasures of a weekend in Kent.
She did not want to ask, Do you know her address?, thus betraying herself; but she asked, idly, “Where was she ringing from?” Jill again did not reply, since she was counting, but at last said, “From home. Well, I suppose so.”
She was not noticing anything. Alice waited until Jill stood up, with three white canvas bags, notes and cheques and coins separately, and put them into the safe.
“Oh well, I’ll be off,” Alice said.
“I’ll tell your father you were here,” said Jill.
When Alice arrived home, she counted what she had. It was a thousand pounds. At once she thought: I could have taken two thousand, three—it would come to the same thing. In any case, when they know the money has gone, when they remember I was there, they’ll know it was me. Why not be hung for a sheep as for a lamb?
Well, it would have to do.
Alice thought for some time about where to put it. She was not going to tell Jasper. At last she zipped open her sleeping bag, slid the two packets of notes into it, and thought that only the nastiest luck would bring anyone to touch it, to find what she had.
Friday night. Jasper and Bert had been gone for ten days. They had said they would come at the weekend.
Thinking Pat, where’s Pat?, she