The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing

lay quiet, listening to hear whether Pat and Bert would start up again. They did. But Alice was worn out. She fell asleep, and when she woke it was light. Jasper had gone, and she knew that they had all gone, and she was alone in the house except perhaps for Philip. She went to see. No Philip; and his tools lay near the gap in the floorboards where he had been replacing cable.

      She must get money. She must.

      It was nine in the morning.

      She was thinking: if I talk to Mum, if I explain…But the thought sank away into a pit of dismay. She did not remember what her mother had actually said, but her empty voice, as though all life had been sucked out of her, that Alice did remember. But what is the matter with her, Alice thought indignantly, what’s she going on about?

      Her father. But he must give it to me. He’s got to! This thought too died in her; could not maintain itself…she found she was thinking of her father’s new house. Well, not so new; he had been there over five years, for she and Jasper had not moved in with her mother until her father had been gone for a good year or more. A new wife. Two new children. Alice stood, imagining the house, which she had been in several times. The garden: Jane. Jane Mellings with her two pretty infants in the big green garden, full now of spring flowers and forsythia.

      Alice came to life, ran downstairs, snatched up her jacket and was out of the house and into the street where people were starting up cars to go to work. As she ran she thought: The dustmen said they would come! But she would only be gone an hour, they won’t come so early – but how do I know? If they come and find no one here…all the same she kept on running, thinking: But they won’t come yet, I just know they won’t.

      She panted into the Underground, snatched a ticket from the machine, belted down the stairs, and there was a fortuitous train. Alice was not surprised, knowing that things were going her way this morning. She fidgeted as she stood on the crowded train, ran up the stairs at the other end, ran, ran along the leafy avenues, and then she came to a stop outside her father’s house, which was no more than half a mile from her mother’s.

      In the garden she saw, not at all to her surprise, Jane, her father’s new wife, sitting on the lawn, on a large red and green striped blanket, with two little scraps of children, on whose fair heads the sun glistened.

      Alice removed her eyes from the scene, as if her gaze might have the power to force Jane to look at her. Alice went straight up the path to the front door, found it locked, went round the house to the back. She would be in full view of Jane if she only turned her head. She walked into the kitchen, which made Alice’s heart ache, being large, and with that great wooden table set with bowls of fruit and flowers which for Alice were the symbol of happiness.

      Alice ran into the hall and up the stairs, thinking that if her father was late today going to work – only he never was – she would say: Oh hello, Dad, there you are! She opened the door into their bedroom calmly, and saw, as she expected, the large marriage bed, which had on it thrown-back duvets, and Jane’s nightdress (scarlet silk, Alice noted, severely), her father’s pyjamas, a child’s striped woolly ball, and a teddy bear.

      She went straight to the sliding doors behind which her father’s clothes were hanging. Neatly. Her father was a methodical man. She went through his pockets, knowing she would find something, for it had been a joke, in their house, that Dorothy Mellings found money in his pockets, and made a point of using it on luxuries. He would say – Alice’s father, ‘Right, come clean, what have you spent it on?’ And Alice’s mother would say, ‘Brandied peaches.’ Or marrons glacés, or Glenfiddich whisky.

      Alice’s hands darted in and out of the pockets and she was praying, Dear God, let there be some money, let there be, let there be a lot. Her fingers felt a soft thick wad and she brought it out, not believing in her luck. A thick soft pack of notes. Ten-pound notes. She slid them into her breast pocket, and was out of the room, down the stairs, and then through the kitchen into the back garden. She hardly paused to see whether Jane was safely looking the other way. Alice knew she would be.

      Alice was out of the house and in the road and then out of sight of the house in a minute. There she stood, back to the road, facing into a tall hedge, and counted the notes. She could not believe it. It was true. Three hundred pounds.

      Well, he would miss that sum, it wasn’t just a jar of fucking bloody ginger, or peaches. Three hundred pounds: he would think she had stolen it – Jane had. Let him. A cold sour pleasure filled Alice and she slid the notes back and began running. The dustmen!

      Three-quarters of an hour after she had left, she was back at the house, and she saw the rubbish-van turn in from the main road.

      She knew, she knew that all would go well, and stood smiling, her pounding heart sending the blood hissing through her ears.

      From the rubbish-van jumped the same three men who, having acknowledged her there, began to hump the black shining sacks. Not a word about the rain that squelched in the sacks with the rubbish.

      It took them twenty minutes or so, by which time Joan Robbins had come out to stand at her door, arms folded, watching. And who else was watching? Alice did not look, but made a point of going to the hedge to speak to Joan Robbins and smile: neighbours and a little gossip, that’s what observers would see; and then she stood at the gate from where the last black bag had been taken, and put into the hand of Alan the driver the sum of fifteen pounds, with the smile of a householder. And went indoors. It was just after ten in the morning. And the day lay ahead, and it would be filled every minute, with useful activity. It would, once she had started. For she had run out of steam. Now she was thinking of them, her friends, her family, who would by now be down at the Melstead works, would have blended with the others, would be standing taking the measure of the police, would be walking confidently about, exchanging remarks the police would have to hear and ignore – ignore until they got their own back later.

      Bert and Jasper and Pat, Jim and Philip, Roberta and Faye – she hoped those two would be careful. Well, they were all politically mature, they would know how far they could go. Jasper? Jasper had not been in a confrontation for a long time; for one thing he had only just finished being bound over. It was not that she wanted him safe, but that she wanted things done right. Jasper was wild, had been bound over once for two years, and not for anything useful – as she judged it – but because of carelessness.

      Alice sat by herself, the large shabby sitting-room comfortably about her, and thought that she was hungry. She did not have the energy to go out again. Against the wall was a crumpled carrier-bag, and in it, a loaf of bread and some salami. God knew how long that had been there, but she didn’t care. She sat eating, slowly, careful of crumbs. For this room, she would need help, it was so large and the ceilings so tall. But the kitchen…It took an hour or so to get herself going; she was really tired. Besides, she was enjoying mentally spending the money that she could feel in a large soft lump just under her heart. Then she did pull herself up, and went into the kitchen. Filling buckets with – unfortunately – cold water, she began work. Swabbing down ceilings, walls, while she manoeuvred the step-ladder around the cooker which still lay on its side on the floor. At one point she knew that tears were running down her cheeks – she had been thinking of the others, all together, shouting in unison, ‘Thatcher out, out, out!’, shouting, ‘Scabs out, out, out!’

      She could hear them chant, ‘The workers united, Shall never be defeated.’

      She thought how one of them, Philip, yes, she thought, Philip, would go off to a pub and buy sandwiches and beer for all of them. There might even be a mobile canteen by now; there ought to be, the picket had been going on for some time.

      She thought of how the atmosphere would get thick and electric and how when the armoured vans – the symbol of everything they loathed – started to move, the crowd would struggle together and become like a wall against which the police…

      Alice wept a little, aloud, snuffling and gulping, as she stood swabbing the floor. If they decided that Philip could not stay here, then…those tiles on the roof, those tiles…