Читать книгу The Good Terrorist - Doris Lessing - Страница 8

Alice dozed a little. In her mind she was already living the next day. She waited for the light, which came in gloomily through dirty windows and showed the filth of this room. Now she ached for tea, something to eat. She crept down into the hall which still belonged to night and the hurricane lamp; then into the sitting-room, hoping that the thermos might be there. But she drank cold water from a jug, then used, with pride but caution, the lavatory, thinking of the pipes left uncared for over an unknown number of winters. Then she went to the Underground, stopping for breakfast at Fred’s Caff. There was room for eight or ten tables, set close. A cosy scene, not to say intimate. Mostly men. Two women were sitting together. At first they seemed middle-aged, because of their stolidity and calm; then it could be seen they were youngish, but tired. Probably cleaners after an early-morning job in local offices. At the counter Alice asked for tea and – apologetically – brown toast, was told by – very likely – Fred’s wife, for she had a proprietorial air, that they didn’t do brown toast. Alice went to look for a place carrying tea, a plate of white toast that dripped butter, a rock cake. As a concession to health, she went back to get orange juice. It was clear to her that in this establishment it would be best to sit with the two women, and did so.

They were both eating toast, and drinking muddy coffee. They sat in the loose, emptied poses of women consciously relaxing, and on their faces were vague good-natured smiles which turned on Alice, like shields. They did not want to talk, only to sit.

The salt of the earth! Alice was dutifully saying to herself, watching this scene of workers fuelling themselves for a hard day’s work with plates of eggs, chips, sausages, fried bread, baked beans – the lot. Cholesterol, agonized Alice, and they all look so unhealthy! They had a pallid greasy look like bacon fat, or undercooked chips. In the pocket of each, or on the tables, being read, was the Sun or the Mirror. Only lumpens, thought Alice, relieved there was no obligation to admire them. Building or road workers, perhaps even self-employed; it wasn’t these men who would save Britain from itself! Alice settled down to enjoy her delicious buttersodden toast, and soon felt better. Not really wanting the cold sour orange juice, she made herself drink it between cups of the bitter tea. The two women watched her, with the detached attention they would give to the interesting mores of a foreigner, taking in everything about her without seeming to do so. She had quite nice curly hair, they could be heard thinking; why didn’t she do something with it? It was dusty! What a pity about that heavy army jacket, more like a man’s, really! That was dusty too! Look at her hands, she didn’t put herself out to keep her nails clean! Having condemned, and lost interest, they heaved themselves up and departed, with parting shouts at the woman behind the counter. ‘Ta, Liz.’ ‘See you tomorrow, Betty.’

They came here every morning after three or four hours’ stint in the offices. These men came in on their way to work. They all knew each other, Alice could see; it was like a club. She finished up quickly and left. Outside the newsagent’s on the corner, the two women she had been sitting with had been joined by a third. They wore all shapeless trousers, blouses, cardigans and carried heavy shopping bags. Their work gear. They stood together gossiping, taking up as little room as they could, because the full tide of the morning rush to work filled the pavements.

It was still too early. It was only just after eight. Her mother would be taking her bath. If Alice went there now she could quietly let herself in, and make the coffee, to give her mother a surprise when she came down in her dressing-gown. Then they could sit at the big table in the kitchen and eat their muesli and drink their coffee. Dorothy would read her Times, and she, the Guardian. To that house every day were delivered The Times, the Guardian, the Morning Star and on Saturday the Socialist Worker, the last two for herself and Jasper. Jasper said he read the Worker because one should know what the opposition was doing; but Alice knew that he secretly had Trotskyist tendencies. Not that she minded about that; she believed that socialists of all persuasions should pull together for the common good. In her mother’s house, she read the Guardian. For years, that newspaper had been the only one to be seen. Then, one day, her mother had dropped in to visit her great friend Zoë Devlin, and found her wearing a Guardian apron; the word ‘Guardian’ printed in various sizes of black print, on white. This had given Dorothy Mellings a shock; she had had a revelation because of this sight, she had said. That Zoë Devlin, of all people in the world, should be willing to put herself into uniform, to proclaim conformity!

It was the beginning of her mother’s period of pretty farfetched utterances – a period by no means over. The beginning, too, of a series of meetings, arranged between the two women for the purpose of re-examining what they thought. ‘We go along for decades,’ Alice had heard her mother say on the telephone, initiating the first discussion, ‘taking it for granted we agree about things, and we don’t. Like hell we do! We’re going to have to decide if you and I have anything in common, Zoë, how about it?’

Typical intellectual shit, Jasper had opined, meaning Dorothy to hear it.

Remembering Jasper, Alice understood she could not just turn up now, make coffee, and greet her mother with a smile.

She got on the train, and found another café, where no one would think her remarkable. It was nearly empty; its busy time would not start for another two hours, when shoppers, men and women, came in. Now Alice ate wholemeal buns and honey and was restored to grace, and with an eye on the clock on the wall, bided her time. Her mother would probably go out to the shops about nine-thirty, ten. She liked to get shopping over, for she hated it.

Alice had done the shopping, for four years. She loved it. When she returned to the great kitchen with cartons full of food brought back in the car, she would carefully put everything away. Her mother would probably be there (if Jasper wasn’t) and they would talk, getting on like anything! They always did! At home Alice was a good girl, a good daughter, as she had always enjoyed being. It was she who managed the kitchen…of course, her mother was pleased to have her do it. (There was an uneasy little thought tucked away somewhere here, but Alice chose to ignore it.) For the four years Alice and Jasper had been there, she had shopped and cooked. She had also cooked – sometimes commandeering the kitchen for two or three days at a time – the food she sold at the market. Jasper used to come in quickly, taking his opportunity when Dorothy was not around, and fill himself with whatever she was making that day – ‘her’ soup, for instance; cakes, good healthy bread. Or, if she were not cooking, might be at the market, he sneaked to the refrigerator and took anything there he fancied. Alice kept it well supplied with ham and salami and pickles for him. He cut himself great sandwiches and took them to his room and stayed there, not coming down for hours. Dorothy, at the beginning, had asked, uneasy, ‘What does Jasper do up there all day?’ ‘He studies,’ Alice always said, proud and forbidding. She knew that he did nothing at all, sometimes, all day. He might read the Socialist Worker and the Morning Star. Otherwise he listened to pop, through headphones, and sometimes danced to it quietly by himself, all over the room. He was very graceful, Alice knew; he hated to be seen, and this was a pity. He should have danced: done ballet, perhaps?

Then he would come down again, silently, to get more food. He would never willingly come into the kitchen if Dorothy were there. He never sat down to eat with them. When Alice remonstrated, said her mother did not like it, he had said she did not like him (which was true, as it turned out, though Dorothy certainly had not said so at the start). For his part he thought her a vulgar tart. This epithet, so far off any sort of mark, only stunned Alice’s responses, so she said feebly, ‘But Jasper, how can you say that?’ At which he made loud rude noises, with his lips.

Of course when Dorothy had guests, Jasper was not there. He really might just as well not have been in the house, except for that steady pilfering of food from the kitchen. Anyone would think that Dorothy grudged him the food! Alice had cried out often enough to him, and then when he was merely abusive, to herself.

Now sitting in this friendly, companionable café, where people coming in were likely to greet her; eating more buns, more honey (to fill in time now, not from hunger), Alice was thinking: Well, but she does hate Jasper, always did, people do. And she did grudge him his food, probably; if she hated him. Alice thought, at last, in something like a little panic: What must it have been like for her, never having her own kitchen, not even being able to come into it, for fear of running into Jasper? And then: I was simply doing everything, all the cooking. And she loves cooking…

At half-past nine Alice left the café, calling goodbye to Sarah, who had served there for years. Once a refugee from Austria, she was now an elderly woman with photographs of her grown-up grandchildren stuck on the wall behind the counter. Alice walked up, not too fast, to her mother’s house. She stood outside for some time, then thought that any watching neighbour would find this peculiar. She let herself in with the key she had not handed her mother when she had left yesterday for ever. Not a sound in the house. Alice stood in the hall, breathing in the house, home; the big, easy-fitting, accommodating house that smelled of friendship. She went into the kitchen and her heart turned over. On the floor were tea-chests full of dishes and plates, and, stacked all over the table, teacups and saucers and glasses, already tucked into newspaper. Oh, of course, now that she and Jasper had left, her mother would be giving the unnecessary china and stuff to jumble. Yes, that must be it. A small child, threatened, eyes wide and frantic, Alice stood looking at the tea-chests, then ran upstairs to her own room. It was as she had left it yesterday. She felt better. She went up a floor to the room Jasper had used. On the floor was a rug, Bokhara. Once it had been in the sitting-room, but it got frail, and found a safe place under a table in the room which, until Jasper commandeered it, was little used. It was beautiful. Alice tenderly rolled it up, and ran down with it to the kitchen. Now she hoped that she would not run into her mother. She looked around for paper and a biro, wrote, ‘I have taken the rug, Alice’ and stood this note among the wrapped glasses. Again she was endangered by the sight of the tea-chests. But she made herself forget them, and went out of the house. At the end of the street her mother was coming towards her under a canopy of bright green. She walked slowly, head down. She looked tired and old. Alice ran fast the other way, clutching the heavy rug, until out of sight of her mother, and then walked, increasingly slowly, to Chalk Farm. The carpet shop was only just open. A middle-aged woman sat at a desk, cup of coffee before her, and pushed down dark glasses to look over them at Alice.

‘You want to sell?’ she inquired. ‘Pretty!’ as Alice unrolled the rug on the floor, breathing hard. Together they stood looking, captivated and quietened by the pool of soft patterned colour on the floor. The woman bent, picked it up, and held it against the light. Alice moved round to stand by her and saw the light pricking through, and in one place glaring. Alice’s throat was tight at the back. She thought wildly: I’ll take it to the squat, it’s so beautiful…but waited as the rug was thrown down on the floor again, just anyhow, in folds, and the woman said, ‘It’s badly worn. It would have to be mended. I couldn’t give you more than thirty.’

‘Thirty?’ moaned Alice. She didn’t know what she had expected. She knew it was, or had been, valuable. ‘Thirty,’ she stammered, thinking it had not been worth taking it.

‘My advice is, keep it and enjoy it,’ said the woman, going back to her desk, letting the dark glasses fall back into place, and drinking coffee.

‘No, I need the money,’ said Alice.

She took the three notes and, lingering to look at the rug lying there abandoned by her, went out of the shop.

She bought food for Jasper and went back to the squat. The street had a morning look, no one out, people had gone to work and to school; inside the women would be cleaning or with the kids. But she did not expect anyone to be up yet in her house; in squats no one got up early.

But Pat was in the sitting-room by herself, drinking coffee from the vacuum flask. She indicated with a gesture that Alice should help herself, but Alice was still full of her good breakfasts, and shook her head. She said, ‘I’ve got a bit of money, but not enough.’

Pat said nothing. In this strong morning light she looked older, all loosened and used, not cherry-bright. Her hair had not been brushed yet, and she smelled of sex and sweat. Alice thought, Today we’ll tackle the bathrooms. There were two.

Pat had still not said anything, but now she lit a cigarette, and smoked it as though she planned to drown in smoke.

Alice had seen that Pat was one of those who needed time to come to in the mornings, and was not going to say anything. She sat quietly and surveyed the state of the room: the curtains were rags, and could not be expected to stand up to dry-cleaning. Well, perhaps her mother…The carpet – it would do. A vacuum cleaner?

She knew Pat was looking at her but did not meet the look. She felt Pat was an ally, did not want to challenge this feeling.

Pat said, coughing a little from the smoke, ‘Twenty-four hours. You’ve been here twenty-four hours!’ And laughed. Not unfriendly. But reserving judgment. Fair enough, thought Alice. In politics one had to…

There was a sudden arrival of sound in the street, and the rubbish van stood outside. With an exclamation Alice ran out, and straight up to two men who were shouldering up rubbish bins from the next garden. ‘Please, please, please…’ They stood there, side by side, looking down at her, big men, strong for this job, confronted by this girl who was both stubbornly not to be moved, and frantic. She stammered, ‘What will you take to clear this garden…? Yes, I know…’ Their faces put on identical expressions of disgusted derision, as they looked from the sordid mess to her, back to the mess, at her, and then steadily at the mess, assessing it.

‘You should call in the Council,’ said one, at last.

‘You are the Council,’ said Alice. ‘No, please, please…look, we’ve come to an arrangement. An agreed arrangement. We will pay the expenses. You know, an agreed squat.’

‘Here, Alan,’ shouted one of them towards a great shaking throbbing lorry that stood there ready to chew up any amount of plastic cartons, tins, papers – the rubbish that crammed the garden of her house to the level of the windows.

Out of the lorry came another large man in blue dungarees and wearing thick leather gloves. Alan, arbiter of her fate, yet another one, like Philip, like Mary Williams.

She said, ‘What will you take to clear it?’ This was both calmly confident, as befitted her mother’s daughter, and desperate; and they stared, taking their time, at that plump childlike formless face, the round anxious blue eyes, the well-washed but tidy jeans, the thick jacket, and the nice little collared blouse, with flowers on it. And all, everything, impregnated with a greyish dust, which had been brushed and shaken and beaten off, but remained, obstinately, as a dimming of the colour.

They shrugged, as one. Three pairs of eyes conferred.

‘Twenty quid,’ said Alan, the driver.

‘Twenty pounds?’ wailed Alice. ‘Twenty!’

A pause. They looked, as one, uncomfortable. A pause. ‘You get that lot into plastic bags, love, and we’ll pick it up tomorrow. Fifteen.’

She smiled. Then laughed. Then sobbed. ‘Oh thanks, thanks,’ she snuffled.

‘Be around tomorrow, love,’ said Alan, all fatherly, and the three moved off as one to the opposite house and its rubbish bins.

Alice checked for the safety of her thirty pounds, in her pocket, and went back into the house. Pat was where she had been, in a smoke trance. Jim had come down and was eating the food she had brought for Jasper. She said, ‘If we get the stuff into bags, they’ll take it tomorrow.’

‘Money,’ said Pat.

‘Money money money money,’ said Jim, stuffing in bananas.

‘I’ve got the money. If I get the plastic bags…’ She stood before them, all appeal.

‘I’m on,’ said Jim.

‘Right,’ said Pat, ‘but what about the house next door? We can clear this place up as much as you like, but that place is worse than this.’ As Alice stared and stared, her pink mouth slack and doleful, ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t notice? The house next door?’

Alice flew out, and looked first into the garden where the woman neighbour had spoken to her. Suburban order. But there was a tall hedge at the other side of this house, and beyond it…She ran into the main road, and along it a short way, and saw, which she had not done before, because she had made her little excursions by another route, a house identical to the one she was reclaiming, with broken windows, slipped slates, a look of desertion, and a rubbish-filled garden. It stank.

She came thoughtfully and bitterly back to the sitting-room, and asked, ‘Is it empty?’

Pat said, ‘The police cleared it three months ago, but it is full again now.’

‘That’s not our problem,’ said Alice, suspecting it might turn out to be. ‘I’m going to get the plastic bags.’

Enough cost her ten pounds.

Pat looked at the great heap of shining black on the steps, and said, ‘A pretty penny,’ but did not offer. She said, ‘Are we going to do it with our hands?’

Alice, without a moment’s hesitation, ran into the next garden, rang the bell, conferred with Joan Robbins, and came back with a spade, a shovel, a fork.

‘How do you do it!’ said Pat with tired irony, but picked up the fork and a sack and began work.

They laboured. Much worse than it looked, for the lower layers were pressed down and rotting and loathsome. Black glistening sack after sack received its horrible load and was stood next to another, until the garden was crammed with black sacks, their mouths showing decomposing refuse. The thin cat watched from the hedge, its eyes on Alice. Unable to bear it, she soon went in, filled a saucer with milk, another with scraps of cheese, bread and cold chips, and brought them out to the cat, which crept on raggedy paws to the food and ate.

Pat stood resting, looking at Alice. Who was looking at the cat. Jim leaned on a shovel, and said, ‘I had a little cat. It got run over.’

Pat waited for more, but there was no more to come. She shrugged and said, ‘It’s a cat’s life.’ And went on working.

But Jim’s eyes had tears in them, and Alice said, ‘I’m sorry, Jim.’

‘I wouldn’t have another little cat,’ he said. ‘Not after that one,’ and went furiously back to work.

Soon both gardens, back and front, were cleared. Pallid grass was ready to take a new lease on life. A rose, long submerged, had thin whitish shoots.

‘It was a nice garden,’ said Jim, pleased.

‘I smell,’ said Alice bitterly. ‘What are we going to do? And I haven’t even thought about hot water yet. If Philip comes, tell him I won’t be a minute.’

She flew inside; and poured buckets of cold water into the bath; she did what she could, inadequately. Hot water, she was thinking, hot water, that’s next. Money.

Philip did not come.

Bert and Jasper descended together in responsible conversation about some political perspective. They told Alice and Pat they were going to get some breakfast; noticed the cleared garden and the ranks of sacks, said, ‘Nice work,’ and departed to Fred’s Caff.

Pat would have shared a laugh with Alice, but Alice was not going to meet her eyes. She would never betray Jasper, not to anyone!

But Pat persisted, ‘I left one squat because I did all the work. Not just men, either – six of us, three women, and I did it all.’

At this Alice faced Pat seriously, pausing in her labour of cleaning a window, and said, ‘It’s always like that. There’s always one or two who do the work.’ She waited for Pat to comment, disagree, take it up on principle.

‘You don’t mind,’ stated Pat.

She was looking neat and tight and right again, having washed and brushed up. Alice was thinking: Yes, all pretty and nice, her eyes done up, her lips red, and then he can just…She felt bitter.

She said, ‘That’s how it always is.’

‘What a revolutionary,’ said Pat, in her way that was friendly, but with a sting in it that referred, so it seemed, to some permanent and deeply internal judgment of hers, a way of looking at life that was ingrained.

‘But I am a revolutionary,’ said Alice, seriously.

Pat said nothing, but drew in smoke to the very pit of her poor lungs, and held her mouth in a red pout to let out a stream of grey that floated in tendrils to the grimy ceiling. Her eyes followed the spiralling smoke. She said at last, ‘Yes, I think you are. But the others aren’t so sure.’

‘You mean Roberta and Faye? Oh well, they are just – desperadoes!’ said Alice.

‘What?‘ and Pat laughed.

‘You know.’ Four-square in front of Pat, Alice challenged her to take a stand on what she, Alice, knew Pat to be, not a desperado, but a serious person, like herself, Alice. Pat did not flinch away from this confrontation. It was a moment, they knew, of importance.

A silence, and more smoke bathed lungs and was expelled, slowly, sybaritically, both women watching the luxuriant curls.

‘All the same,’ said Pat, ‘they are prepared for anything. They take it on – you know. The worst, if they have to.’

‘Well?’ said Alice, calm, and confident. ‘So would I. I’m ready too.’

‘Yes, I believe you are,’ said Pat.

Jim came in, ‘Philip’s here.’ Out flew Alice, and saw him in the light of day for the first time. A slight, rather stooping boy – only he was a man – with his hollowed, pale cheeks, his wide blue eyes full of light, his long elegant white hands, his sheaves of glistening pale hair. He had his tools with him.

She said, ‘The electricity?’ and walked before him to the ravaged kitchen, knowing that here was something else she must confront and solve. He followed, shut the door after him and said, ‘Alice, if I finish the work here, can I move in?’

She now knew she had expected this. Yes, every time that arrangement, he and his girlfriend, had come up, there had been something not said.

He said, ‘I’ve been wanting to be independent. On my own.’ Knowing she was thinking of the others, their plans, he said, ‘I’m CCU. I don’t see why there should be any problem?’

But not IRA, thought Alice, but knew she would deal with all that later. ‘If it’s up to me, yes,’ she said. Would that be enough? He had taken her as the boss here – as who would not?

He now turned his attention to the ripped wires that were tugged right out of the plaster; the stove, that had been pulled out to lie on its side on the floor.

Bitterness was on his face; the same incredulous rage she felt. They stood together, feeling they could destroy with their bare hands those men who had done this.

Men like the dustmen, thought Alice steadily, making herself think it. Nice men. They did it. But when we have abolished fascist imperialism, there won’t be people like that.

At this thought appeared a mental picture of her mother who, when Alice said things of this kind, sighed, laughed, looked exhausted. Only last week she had said, in her new mode, bitter and brief and flat, ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves.’

‘What’s that?’ Alice had asked.

‘Against – stupidity – the gods – themselves – contend – in vain,’ her mother had said, isolating the words, presenting them to Alice, not as if she had expected anything from Alice, but reminding herself of the uselessness of it all.

The bitterness Alice felt against the Council, the workmen, the Establishment, now encompassed her mother, and she was assaulted by a black rage that made her giddy, and clenched her hands. Coming to herself she saw Philip looking at her, curious. Because of this state of hers which he was judging as more violent than the vandalizing workmen deserved?

She said, ‘I could kill them.’ She heard her voice, deadly. She was surprised at it. She felt her hands hurting, and unclenched them.

‘I could too,’ said Philip, but differently. He had set down grimy bags of tools, and was standing quietly there, waiting. He was looking at her with his by now familiar and hearttouching obstinacy.

The murderess in Alice took herself off, and Alice said, giving him the promise he had to have before he did any more work, ‘It’s only fair, if you do the work.’

He nodded, believing her, and then transferred that obstinacy of his to the attention he gave the mangled wall. ‘It’s not so bad,’ he said at last. ‘Looks as if they smashed the place up in a bit of a fit of temper, they didn’t do much of a job of it.’

‘What?’ she said, incredulous; for it seemed to her the kitchen or at least two walls of it, were sprouting and dangling cables and wires; and the creamy plaster lay like dough in mounds along the bottom of these walls, which were discoloured and scurfy.

‘Seen worse.’ Then, ‘I’ve got to have the floorboards up, can’t work with that down there.’

The fallen plaster had gone hard, and Alice had to smash it free. The kitchen was full of fine white dust. She worked at floor level, while Philip stood above her on the big table he had dragged to the wall. Then, the plaster and rubbish were in sacks, and she swept up with the handbrush and pan, which were all she had. She was irritable and weepy, for she knew that every inch of the ceiling, the walls, should be washed down, should be painted. And then the house, the whole house was like that, and the roof – what would they find when at last they got that horrible upper floor free of its smelly pails? Who was going to replace slates, how to pay for it all? She was brushing and brushing, and each sweep scuffed up more filth into the air, and she was thinking, I’ve got to get to the Electricity Board, how can I, looking like this.

She stood up, a wraith in the white-dust-filled air, and said, ‘Your friend, is she at home, would she give me a bath?’

Philip did not reply, he was examining a cable with a strong torch.

She said, furious, ‘There were public baths till last year, nice ones, not far, they were in Auction Street. Friends of mine used them – they are in a squat in Belsize Road. Then the Council closed them. They closed them.’ She felt tears hot on her chalky cheeks, and stood, spent, looking imploringly at Philip’s slight, almost girlish back.

He said, ‘We had a rare old row, when I left.’

She thought, She threw him out.

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I’ll manage. I’ll get cleaned up and I’m going to the Electricity Board. So be careful, in case they switch it on.’

‘You think you can get them to do that?’

‘I’ve managed it before, haven’t I?’ At the thought of this and other victories, her depression lifted and she was popping with energy again.

In the hall, the two desperadoes were just about to go out into the world of the streets, gardens, neighbours, cats, cars and sparrows.

They looked just like everybody, thought Alice, seeing them turn round, the pretty fair Faye, delicate inside the almost tangible protective ambience of swarthy Roberta, as strong as a tank – as strong as I am, thought Alice, standing there, looking, she knew, like a clown who has just been showered with flour.

‘Well,’ said Faye, humorous, and Roberta commented, ‘Well,’ and the two women laughed, and went out of the door as though all this hard work had nothing to do with them.

‘No good expecting anything,’ said Alice to herself, stoically, after so much experience of those who did and those who wouldn’t. Again she went up to the bathroom and stood naked in desolation, while the bath filled with cold water to the level of the grime mark that showed where she had done all this earlier that day. And again she stood in cold water endeavouring to rid herself of the dirt, her mother’s daughter, thinking viciously of the four years she had lived inside her mother’s house, where hot water came obediently at a touch. They don’t know what it costs, she was muttering, furiously. It all comes from the workers, from us…

She did her best; she put on a nice neat skirt, which she had purloined from her mother, with a joke that it suited her better: she needed a skirt sometimes for respectability, some types of people were reassured by it. She put on another of the little neat-collared shirts, in blue cotton this time, that made her feel herself. She did her best with her hair, which felt greasy and gritty, although she had stood with it held down in a bucket of the unyielding cold water. Then she went into the sitting-room. Pat, relaxed in a big armchair, was asleep. Alice went quietly up and stared down at this unknown woman, who was her ally. She was thinking: She won’t leave yet. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t think much of Bert, she’s going to stay because of all that love.

Pat lay sprawling all over the chair as if she had dropped down off the ceiling. Her head was back, her face lifted and exposed. Eyes, lips trembled on the verge of opening. Alice expected her to wake, and smile. But Pat stayed asleep, vulnerable under Alice’s meticulous inspection of her. Alice continued to stand there, looking. She felt that she possessed Pat, in this look – her life, what she was and would be. Alice could never have allowed herself to sleep like that, open to anyone to come in and look at. It was careless, foolish, like walking about the streets with money held loose in a hand. Alice came closer and bent right down over Pat, to stare at that innocent face with its lightly-shuttered eyes behind which an inhabitant had gone off into that unknown country. Alice felt curious. What was she dreaming about, looking like a baby that has just napped off after a bottle? Alice began to feel protective, wanting Pat to wake up in case the others should come in and see her, defenceless. Then Alice thought, Well, it will probably be Bert, won’t it? Sleeping Beauty! Now it was scorn that she felt, because of Pat’s need. If she’s got to have it, she’s got to have it, said Alice judiciously to herself, making necessary allowances. And stepped lightly out of the sitting-room, through the hall, and into the outside world. It was about three o’clock on a fresh and lively spring afternoon. She took the bus to Electricity, with confidence.

Electricity was a large modern building, set well back from the main road where seethed, in cars and on foot, the lively polyglot needy people whose lives it supported with light, boiling kettles, energetic vacuum cleaners…power. The building looked conscious of its role: nearly a million people depended on it. It stood solid and dependable. Its windows flashed. The cars of its functionaries stood in biddable lines, gleaming.

Alice ran lightly up the steps and, knowing her way from having been in so many similar buildings, went straight to the first floor where she knew she was in the right place, because there was a room where ten or so people waited. Unpaid bills, new accounts, threats of disconnection: a patient little crowd of petitioners. From this room opened two doors, and Alice sat herself so as to be able to see into both rooms. As the doors opened to emit one customer, and admit another, Alice examined the faces of these new arbiters, sitting behind their respective desks. Women. One she knew, after a single glance, she must avoid. The letter-of-the-law, that woman, judged Alice, seeing a certain self-satisfaction in competence. A thin face and lips, neatly waved fair hair, a smile Alice had no intention of earning. But the other woman, yes, she would do, although at first glance…She was large, and her thick tight dress held her solid and secure, performing the function of a corset, but from this fortress of a dress emerged a large soft rather girlish face and large soft hands. Alice adjusted her seat, and in due course found herself sitting in front of this motherly lady who, Alice knew, several times a day stretched things a little because she was sorry for people.

Alice told her story, and described – knowing exactly what she was doing – the large solid house which inexplicably was going to be pulled down so that yet another nasty block of flats could be built. Then she produced her official-looking Council envelope, with the letter inside.

This official, Mrs Whitfield, only glanced at the letter, and said, ‘Yes, but the house is on the agenda, that’s all, it hasn’t been decided.’ She turned up a card in the cabinet beside her, and said, ‘No. 43? I know it. 43 and 45. I walk past them every day to the Underground. They make me feel sick.’ She looked, embarrassed, at Alice and even blushed.

‘We have already begun to clean 43 up. And the dustmen are coming tomorrow to take it all away.’

‘You want me to get the power switched on now before knowing what the Council decides?’

‘I’m sure it’s going to be all right,’ said Alice, smiling. She was sure. Mrs Whitfield saw this, felt it, and nodded.

‘Who is going to guarantee payment? Are you? Are you in work?’

‘No,’ said Alice, ‘not at the moment.’ She began to talk in a calm, serious way about the houses in Manchester, in Halifax, in Birmingham, which had been rescued, where electricity had flowed obediently through wires, after long abstinence. Mrs Whitfield listened, sitting solid in her chair, while her white large hand held a biro poised above a form: Yes. No.

She said, ‘If I order the power to be switched on, first I must have a guarantor.’

‘But do you know that it is only in this borough – well, one or two others. In Lampton, for instance, you’d have to supply electricity to us. If people demand it, then it must be supplied.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Whitfield mildly, ‘you seem to know the situation as well as I do! I do not make policy. I implement it. The policy in this borough is that there has to be a guarantor.’

But her eyes, large, soft and blue, were direct on Alice’s face and not combative or hostile, far from it; she seemed to be appealing for Alice to come up with something.

‘My father will guarantee payment,’ said Alice. ‘I am sure of that.’

Mrs Whitfield had already started to fill in the form. ‘Then that’s all right,’ she said. ‘His name? His address? His telephone number? And we have to have a deposit.’

Alice took out ten pounds and laid it on the desk. She knew it was not enough. Mrs Whitfield looked at it cautiously, and sighed. She did not look at Alice. A bad sign. She did not take the note. Then, she did raise her eyes to Alice’s face, and seemed startled at what she saw there.

‘How many of you are there?’ she asked in a hurried playing-for-time way, glancing at the note, and then making herself confront Alice’s face, that face which could not be denied. It was not fair! Mrs Whitfield seemed to be feeling. They were inappropriate and wrong, these emotions that Alice had brought into this orderly and sensible office. Probably, what Mrs Whitfield should be doing was simply to tell Alice to go away and come back better supplied with evidence of her status as a citizen. Mrs Whitfield could not do this. She could not. Alice saw from how that large smooth confined bosom heaved, from the soft flushed shocked face, that she – Alice – was on the point of getting her way.

‘Very well,’ said Mrs Whitfield at last, and sat for a moment, not so much in doubt now that she had made a decision, but worried. For Alice. ‘Those are big houses,’ she remarked, meaning: they use a lot of electricity.

‘It’ll be all right,’ said Alice, sure that it would be. ‘Can you switch it on this afternoon? We have got an electrician at work. It would be a help…’

Mrs Whitfield nodded. Alice went out, knowing that the official was watching her go, disturbed, probably already wondering why she had given in.

Instead of going straight home, Alice went to the telephone box at the corner and dialled her mother. A voice she did not at first recognize; but it was her mother. That awful flat voice…Alice nearly said, ‘Hello, this is Alice,’ but could not. She gently replaced the receiver and dialled her father. But it was his partner who answered.

She bought a large thermos, which would always be useful, for example on demos or at pickets; asked Fred’s wife to fill it with strong tea, and went home.

The white dusty cloud in the kitchen had subsided. She said to Philip, now crouched on the floor with half the floorboards up, ‘Be careful they might switch it on at any moment.’

‘It is on, I’ve just tested,’ said Philip, and gave her a smile that made it all worth while.

They sat on the great table, drank strong tea and were companionable and happy. It was a large room. Once a family had had its centre here, warm and safe and unfailing. They had sat together around this table. But Alice knew that before all that could begin again, there must be money.

She left Philip, and went to the sitting-room where Pat was awake and no longer lying abandoned and open to Alice’s anxious curiosities. She was reading. It was a novel. By some Russian. Alice knew the author’s name as she did know the names of authors, that is, as if they were objects on a shelf, round, hard and glittering, with a life and a light of their own. Like marbles, that you could turn between your fingers for as long as you liked, but they would not yield, give up their secrets, submit.

Alice never read anything but newspapers.

As a child they had teased her: Alice has a block against books. She was a late reader, not something to be overlooked in that bookish house. Her parents, particularly her mother, all the visitors, everyone she ever met, had read everything. They never stopped reading. Books flowed in and out of the house in tides. ‘They breed on the shelves,’ her parents, and then her brother, happily joked. But Alice was cherishing her block. It was a world she could choose not to enter. One might politely refuse. She persisted, polite but firm, secretly tasting the power she possessed to disquiet her parents. ‘I do not see the point of all that reading,’ she had said; and continued to say, even at university, doing Politics and Economics, mainly because the books she would be expected to read did not have the inaccessible mocking quality of those others. ‘I am only interested in facts,’ she would say during this period when there was no escaping it: a minimum number of books had to be read.

But later she had learned she could not say this. There had always been books of all kinds in the squats and communes. She used to wonder how it was that a comrade with a good, clear and correct view of life could be prepared to endanger it by reading all that risky equivocal stuff that she might dip into, hastily, retreating as if scalded. She had even secretly read almost to the end of one novel recommended as a useful tool in the struggle, but felt as she had as a child: if she persevered, allowing one book to lead her on to another, she might find herself lost without maps.

But she knew the right things to say. Now she remarked about the book Pat was reading: ‘He’s a very fine humanist writer.’

Pat let Laughter in the Dark close and sat thoughtfully regarding Alice.

‘Nabokov, a humanist?’ she asked, and Alice saw that there was serious danger of what she dreaded more than anything, literary conversation.

‘Well, I think so,’ Alice insisted, with a modest smile and the air of one who was prepared to defend an unpopular position reached after long thought. ‘He really cares about people.’

Somebody – some comrade, at some time, in some squat or other, had said as a joke, ‘When in doubt classify them as humanists.’

Pat’s steady, interested, thoughtful look was reminding Alice of something. Of someone. Yes, Zoë Devlin. Thus she would regard Alice when the subject of literature came up and Alice had had no alternative but to make a contribution.

Suddenly, Alice remembered something. Zoë Devlin. Yes.

A quarrel, or at least an argument between Dorothy Mellings and Zoë Devlin. Recently. Not long before Alice left.

Alice was concentrating so hard on what she remembered that she slowly sat down, hardly noticing what she did, and forgetting about Pat.

Her mother had wanted Zoë to read some book or other and Zoë had said no, she thought its view of politics was reactionary.

‘How do you know when you haven’t read it?’ Dorothy had asked, laughing.

‘There are lots of books like that, aren’t there,’ Zoë had said. ‘Probably written by the CIA.’

‘Zoë,’ Dorothy had said, no longer laughing, ‘is that you? Is that Zoë Devlin speaking? My good friend, the fearless, the open-minded, the incorruptible Zoë Devlin?’

‘I hope it is,’ said Zoë, laughing.

‘I hope it is, too,’ said Dorothy, not laughing. ‘Do we still have anything in common, do you think?’

‘Oh go on, Dorothy, let up, do. I don’t want to quarrel even if you do.’

‘You are not prepared to quarrel about anything so unimportant as a book? As a view of life?’

Zoë had made a joke of it all. Had soon left. Had she been back to the house again? Of course, she must have, she had been in and out of that house for – since before Alice was born.

Zoë was one of Alice’s ‘aunties’, like Theresa.

Why had Alice not thought of going to her for money? Wait, there was something there, at the back of her mind – what? Yes, there had been this flaming row, terrible, between Dorothy and Zoë. Yes, recently, good Christ, not more than a week or so ago. Only one row? No, more. A lot.

Dorothy had said Zoë was soft-centred, like a cream chocolate.

They had screamed at each other. Zoë had gone running out. She – Alice – had screamed at her mother, ‘You aren’t going to have any friends, if you go on like this.’

Alice was feeling sick. Very. She was going to vomit if she wasn’t careful. She sat, very still, eyes squeezed tight, concentrating on not being sick.

She heard Pat’s voice. ‘Alice. Alice. What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, in a hurried, low voice, still concentrating, ‘it’s all right.’ In a minute or two she opened her eyes and said, normally, and as though nothing at all had happened, ‘I am afraid of the police crashing in suddenly.’ This was what she had come to say.

‘The police? Why, what do you mean?’

‘We’ve got to decide. We have to make a decision. Suppose they come crashing in.’

‘We’ve survived it before.’

‘No, I mean, those pails, all those pails. We daren’t empty them into the system. Not all at once. We daren’t. God knows what the pipes are like down there where we can’t see them. If we empty them one at a time, one a day let’s say, it’ll take for ever. But if we dug a pit…’

‘The neighbours,’ said Pat at once.

‘I’ll talk to the woman next door.’

‘I can’t see Joan Robbins being mad with joy.’

‘But it will be the end of it, won’t it? And they would all be pleased about that.’

‘It would mean you, me and Jim.’

‘Yes, I know. I’ll go across to the Robbins woman. You ask Jim.’

A pause, Pat yawned, wriggled around in her chair, lifted her book, let it drop again, and then said, ‘I suppose so.’

In the next garden, which was wide, divided by a crunching gravel path, Joan Robbins worked on a border with a fork. Under a tree on the other side sat a very old woman, staring at the sky.

Joan Robbins stood up when Alice appeared, looking defensive and got at. But Alice did not give her time for grievance. She said, ‘Mrs Robbins, can we keep the tools for a bit? We want to dig a pit. A big one. For rubbish.’

Joan Robbins, who had withstood the annoyances of this dreadful No. 43 for so long, looked as if she would say no, say she had had enough of it all. Her pleasant face was irritable, and flushed.

But now the old woman under the tree sat up in the chair, leaned forward, staring. Her face was gaunt and purplish, with white woolly hair sticking out around it. She said in a thick, old, unsteady voice, ‘You dirty people.’

‘No,’ said Alice steadily. ‘No, we’re not. We’re cleaning it all up.’

‘Nasty dirty people,’ said the old woman, less certain of herself, having taken in Alice, such a nice girl, standing on the green lawn with daffodils behind her.

Alice said, ‘Your mother?’

‘Sitting tenant. Upstairs flat,’ said Mrs Robbins, not moderating her voice, and Alice understood the situation in a flash. She went over to the old woman, and said, ‘How do you do? I’m Alice Mellings. I’ve just moved in to 43 and we’re fixing the place up, and getting the rubbish out.’

The old woman sank back, her eyes seeming to glaze with the effort of it all.

‘Goodbye,’ said Alice. ‘See you again soon,’ and went back to Mrs Robbins, who asked sullenly, ‘What are you going to bury?’ indicating the ranks and ranks of filled shiny black sacks.

She knew!

Alice said, ‘It’ll get rid of all the smell all at once. We thought, get the pit dug this afternoon, and get rid of everything tonight…Once and for all.’

‘It’s terrible,’ said Mrs Robbins, tearful. ‘This is such a nice street.’

‘By this time tomorrow the rubbish will be all gone. The smell will be gone.’

‘And what about the other house. What about 45? In summer, the flies! It shouldn’t be allowed. The police got them out once but…they are back again.’

She could have said you; and Alice persisted, ‘If we start digging now…’

Joan Robbins said, ‘Well, I suppose if you dig deep enough…’

Alice flew back home. In the room where she had first seen him, Jim was tapping his drums. He at first did not smile, then did, because it was his nature, but said, ‘Yes, and the next thing, they’ll say, Jim, you must leave,’ he accused.

‘No, they won’t,’ said Alice, making another promise.

He got up, followed her; they found Pat in the hall. In the part of the garden away from the main road, concealed from it by the house, was a place under a tree that had once been a compost heap. There they began digging, while over the hedge Mrs Robbins was steadily working at her border, not looking at them. But she was their barrier against the rest of the busybody street, which of course was looking through its windows at them, gossiping, even thinking it was time to ring the police again.

The earth was soft. They came on the skeleton of a large dog; two old pennies; a broken knife, a rusting garden fork, which would be quite useful when cleaned up; and then a bottle…another bottle. Soon they were hauling out bottles, bottles, bottles. Whisky and brandy and gin, bottles of all sizes, hundreds, and they were standing to waist level in an earthy sweet-smelling pit with bottles rolling and standing around the rim for yards, years of hangovers, oblivion, for someone.

People were coming home from work, were standing and looking, were making comments. One man said unpleasantly: ‘Burying a corpse?’

‘Old Bill’ll be around,’ said Jim, bitter, experienced.

‘Oh God, these bottles,’ swore Pat, and Alice said, ‘The bottle bank. If we had a car…who has a car?’

‘They have one next door.’

‘45? Would they lend it? We have to get rid of these bottles.’

‘Oh, God, Alice,’ said Pat, but she stood her spade against the house wall – beyond which was the sitting-room where they knew Jasper and Bert were, talking; and went out into the side street and then the main street. She was back in a minute, in an old Toyota. They spread empty black plastic sacks on the seats, filled the car with bottles; to the roof at the back, the boot, the pit in front near the driver, leaving only that seat, on which Alice squatted, while Pat drove the car down to the big cement containers where they worked for three-quarters of an hour, smashing in the bottles.

‘That’s it for today,’ said Pat, meaning it, as she parked the car outside 45, and they got out. Alice looked into its garden, appalled.

‘You aren’t going to take that one on too!’ said Pat in another statement.

She went into their house, not looking, and up to the first-floor bathroom.

She did not comment on the new electric bulb, shedding a little light in the hall.

Alice thought: How many rooms in the house? Let’s see, an electric lightbulb for each one? But that will be pounds and pounds, at least ten. I have to have money…

It was dark outside. A damp, blowy night.

She went into the sitting-room. Bert and Jasper were not there. She thought: Then Jim and I…

Jim was again with his drums. She went to him and said, ‘I will carry down the pails. You stand by the pit and fill in the earth. Quickly. Before the whole street comes to complain.’

Jim hesitated, seemed about to protest, but came.

She had never had to do anything as loathsome, not in all her history of squats, communes, derelict houses. The room that had only the few pails in it was bad enough, but the big room, crammed with bubbling pails, made her want to be sick before she even opened the door. She worked steadily, carrying down two pails at a time, controlling her heaving stomach, in a miasma that did not seem to lessen, but rather spread from the house and the garden to the street. She emptied in the buckets, while Jim quickly spaded earth in. His face was set in misery. From the garden opposite came shouts of ‘Pigs!’ Alice went on into the little street and stood against the hedge, which was a tall one, and said through it to someone who stood there watching, a man, ‘We’re clearing it all up. There won’t be any smell after tonight.’

‘You ought to be reported to the Council.’

‘The Council knows,’ said Alice. ‘They know all about it.’ Her voice was serene, confident; she spoke as one householder to another. She walked back under the streetlights into her own dark garden in a calm, almost careless way. And went back to the work of carrying down buckets.

By eleven the pit was filled and covered, and the smell was already going.

Alice and Jim stood together in the dark, surrounded by consoling shrubs. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, and though she never smoked, she took one from him, and they stood smoking together, drawing in the sweet clouds and puffing them out deliberately, trying to fill the garden air with it.

Jim said, with a scared laugh, ‘That was all my shit. Well, most. Some was Faye’s and Roberta’s.’

‘Yes, I know. Well, never mind.’

‘Have you thought, Alice – have you ever thought? – how much shit we all make in our lives? I mean, if the shit we made in our lives was put in a drum, or let’s say a big tank, you’d need a tank like the Battersea power station for everyone.’ He was laughing, but he sounded frightened. ‘It all goes into the sewers, underneath here, but suppose the sewers just packed up?’

‘They won’t,’ said Alice, peering through the darkness at his dark face to find out what was really frightening him.

‘Why shouldn’t they? I mean, they say our sewers are all old and rotten. Suppose they just explode? With sewer-gas?’ He laughed again.

She did not know what to say.

‘I mean, we just go on living in this city,’ he said, full of despair. ‘We just go on living…’

Very far from his usual self was Jim now. Gone was that friendly sweet-cheeked face. It was bitter, and angry, and fearful.

She said, ‘Come in, Jim, let’s have a cup of tea and forget it, it’s done.’

‘That’s just what I mean,’ he said, sullen. ‘You say, come and have a cup of tea. And that’s the end of it. But it isn’t the end of it, not on your life it isn’t.’

And he flung down the spade and went in to shut himself in his room.

Alice followed. For the third time that day she stood in the grimy bath labouring with cold water to get herself clean.

Then she went upstairs. On the top floor all the windows were open, admitting a fresh smell. It was raining steadily. The sacks of refuse would have a lot of water in them, and the dustmen might be bad-tempered about it.

Midnight. Alice slumped down the stairs, yawning, holding the sense of the house in her mind, the pattern of the rooms, everything that needed to be done. Where was Jasper? She wanted Jasper. The need for Jasper overtook her sometimes, like this. Just to know he was there somewhere, or if not, soon would be. Her heart was pounding in distress, missing Jasper. But as she reached the bottom step, there was a pounding on the door as if there was a battering-ram at work. The police. Her mind raced: Jasper? If he was in the house, would he keep out of sight? Old Bill had only to take one look at Jasper and they were at him. He and she had joked often enough that if the police saw Jasper a hundred yards off and in the dark, they would close in on the kill; they felt something about him they could not bear. And Roberta and Faye? Please God they were still at the picket. The police would have only to take one look at them, too, to be set off. Philip? The wrong sort of policeman would find that childish appeal irresistible. But Pat would be all right, and Bert…Jim where was he?

As Alice thought this, Pat appeared at the sitting-room door, closing it behind her in a way that told Alice that the two men were in there; and Philip stood at the kitchen door, holding a large torch, switched on, and a pair of pliers.

Alice ran to the front door, and opened it quickly, so that the men who had been battering at it crashed in, almost on top of her.

‘Come in,’ she said equably, having sized up their condition in a glance. They had their hunting look, which she knew so well, but it wasn’t too bad, their blood wasn’t really up, except perhaps for that one, whose face she knew. Not as an individual but as a type. It was a neat, cold, tidy face, with a little moustache: a baby face with hard cold grey eyes. He enjoys it, she thought; and seeing his quick look around, straining to go, as if on the end of a leash, she felt sharp little thrills down her thighs. She was careful that he did not catch her glance, but went forward to stand in front of a big broad man, who must weigh fifteen stone. A sergeant. She knew his type too. Not too bad. She had to look right up to him, and he looked down at her, in judgment.

‘We told you lot to clear out,’ said this man, with the edge on his voice that the dustmen had, a hard contempt, but he was making a gesture to a couple of the men who were about to pull Pat aside and go into the sitting-room. They desisted.

Alice held out the yellow paper, and said, ‘We are an agreed squat.’

‘Not yet you aren’t,’ said the sergeant, taking in the main point at once.

‘No, but it’s only two days. I’ve done this before, you see,’ she said reasonably. ‘It’s all right if you pay the bills and keep the place clean.’

‘Clean,’ said the sergeant, bending down over her, hands on hips like a stage sergeant, Mr Plod the Policeman. ‘It’s disgusting.’

‘You saw that rubbish outside,’ said Alice. ‘The Council are taking that tomorrow. I organized it with them.’

‘You did, did you? Then why were we having phone calls about you digging some pit in the garden and filling it with muck?’

‘Muck is the word,’ said Alice. ‘The Council workmen filled the lavatories with cement, so there were buckets upstairs. We had to get rid of them. We dug a pit.’

A pause. The big man still stood there, leaning a little forward, allowing his broad face to express measured incredulity.

‘You dug a pit,’ he said.

‘Yes, we did.’

‘In the middle of London. You dig a pit.’

‘That’s right,’ said Alice, polite.

‘And having dug a pit, you fill it with – ‘ He hesitated.

‘Shit,’ said Alice, calm.

The five other policemen laughed, sniggered, drew in their breaths, according to their natures, but the young brute on whom Alice had been keeping half an eye suddenly kicked out at the door of the cupboard under the stairs, smashing it.

Philip let out an exclamation, and he was by him in a flash. ‘You said something?’ he said, looming over Philip, standing there in his little white overalls. A kick would smash him to pieces.

‘Never mind,’ said the sergeant authoritatively. He wanted to pursue the main crime. The vicious one fell back a step and stood with clenched hands, his eyes at work now on Pat, who stood relaxed, watching Alice. Alice, seeing his look, knew that if Pat were to meet that one in a demo, she could expect the worst. Again the little cold thrill of sensation.

‘You – stand – there – and tell – me – that you dig a pit in a garden, and just make a cesspit, without a by-your-leave, without any authority!’

‘But what else could we do,’ said Alice in clear reasonable tones. ‘We couldn’t put dozens of buckets of shit into the sewage system all at once. Not in a house that’s been empty. You’d really have cause to complain then, wouldn’t you?’

A pause. ‘You can’t do that kind of thing,’ said the sergeant, after a pause. In retreat. Please God, thought Alice, Pat or Philip won’t say: But we’ve done it!

‘It was a very large pit,’ she said. ‘We came by chance on some lush’s bottle-bin. It was a good five feet deep. We’d show you, but it’s raining. If you come round tomorrow we could show you then?’

A silence. It hung in the balance. Please, please, God, thought Alice, nothing will happen, the two girls won’t walk in; that really would finish it, or Jasper doesn’t suddenly take it into his head…For Jasper, in a certain mood, might easily come out and enjoy provoking a confrontation.

But the thing held. The five policemen who had been scattered around the space of the hall came in closer to their leader, like a posse, and Alice said, ‘Excuse me, but could I have that?’ For the sergeant still held the yellow paper. He read it through again, solemnly, and then gave it back.

‘I’ll have to report that pit to the Water Board,’ he said.

‘There were no pipes where we dug,’ said Alice, ‘not one.’

‘Only a skeleton,’ said Pat, negligently. As one the six men turned, glaring. ‘A dog,’ said Pat. ‘It was a dog’s grave.’

The men relaxed. But they kept their eyes on Pat. She had got a rise out of them, but so smoothly. In the dim light from the single bulb, she lounged there, a dark handsome girl, politely smiling.

‘We’ll be back,’ said the sergeant, and hitched his head at the door. They all went out, the killer last, with a cold frustrated look at little Philip, at Pat, but not much at the ordinary, unchallenging Alice.

The door shut. No one moved. They all stood staring at that door; they could come crashing back again. A trap? But the seconds went past. They heard a car start up. Alice shook her head at Philip, who seemed about to break into some effusion of feeling. And the door did open. It was the sergeant.

‘I’ve been taking a look at those sacks,’ he said. ‘You said they were being taken tomorrow?’ But his eyes were at work all around the hall, lingering with a slight frown on the smashed-in cupboard door under the stairs.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Alice. Then, in a disappointed voice, ‘Not very nice, was it, smashing in that little door, for nothing.’

‘Put in a complaint,’ he said, briefly, almost good-naturedly, and disappeared.

‘Fascist shits,’ said Pat, like an explosion, and did not move. They remained where they were. They might have been playing ‘statues’.

They let a couple of minutes go past, then, as one, came to life as Jim emerged from the shadows of his room, grinning, and the four went into the sitting-room where Jasper and Bert lounged, drinking beer. Alice knew from how they looked at her that Jasper had been telling Bert, again, how good she was at this – reflecting credit on himself; and that Pat had been impressed, and Jim was incredulous at the apparent ease of it all. She knew that this was a moment when she could get her own way about anything, and in her mind, at the head of her long agenda of difficulties to be overcome, stood the item: Philip and Jim.

She accepted a bottle of beer from Bert, who gave her, with it, the thumbs-up sign, and soon they were all sitting in a close group, in the centre of the tall room. Candlelit, there had not been time to put a bulb in. But Philip had sat down a little apart, and tentatively.

‘First,’ said Pat, ‘to Alice!’

They drank to her, and she sat silent, smiling, afraid she would cry.

Now she thought, I’ll bring up Philip. I’ll bring up Jim. We’ll get it settled.

But in the hall, suddenly, were voices, laughter, and in a moment the two girls came in, lit with the exaltation that comes from a day’s satisfactory picketing and demonstrating and marching.

Roberta, laughing, came over to the carrier of bottles, put one to her mouth, and drank standing, swallowing the beer down, then handed the bottle to Faye, who did the same.

‘What a day,’ said Roberta, and she let herself slide on to the arm of a chair, while Faye sat on the other. A couple apart, they surveyed the rest, as adventurers do stay-at-homes, and began their tale, Roberta leading, Faye filling in.

It was a question of the two or three hundred pickets – numbers had varied, as people came and went – preventing vans with newspapers from getting through the gates to distribute them. The police had been there to see the vans safely through.

‘Two hundred police,’ said Roberta, scornfully. ‘Two hundred fucking police!’

‘More police than pickets,’ said Faye, laughing, and Roberta watched her, fondly. Faye, animated and alive, was really very pretty. Her look of listlessness, even depression, had gone. She seemed to sparkle in the dim room.

‘I had to stop Faye from getting carried away,’ said Roberta. ‘Otherwise she’d have been out there. Of course, with both of us having to keep a low profile…’

‘Were there arrests?’

‘Five,’ said Roberta. ‘They got Gerry. He didn’t go quietly though.’

‘I should say not,’ said Faye proudly.

‘Who else?’

‘Didn’t know the others. They were the Militant lot, I think.’

A pause. Alice knew she had lost her advantage, and felt discouraged. And, seeing Jasper’s face as he watched the two campaigning girls, she was thinking: He’ll be off down there tomorrow, if I know anything.

He said, ‘I’ll go down tomorrow.’ And he looked at Bert who said, ‘Right.’

Bert looked at Pat, and she said, ‘I’m on.’

A silence. Faye said excitedly, ‘I’d like to have a go at one of those vans. You know, when I saw that thing standing there, armoured, all lit up, it had wire over the windscreen, I just hated it so much – it looked bloody evil.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Bert. ‘Epitomizes everything we hate.’

‘I’d like to – I’d like to –’ Here Faye, seeing how her lover looked at her, began playing up to it prettily, said with a mock shiver, ‘I’d like to sink my teeth into it!’ and Roberta gave her a soft friendly clout across the shoulders, and then hugged her briefly.

‘All the same,’ she said, ‘we two ought not to be there again. We mustn’t be caught.’

‘Oh,’ pouted Faye, ‘why not, we just have to be careful.’

‘They’ll have it all photographed, of course, they’ll have your pictures,’ said Jim excitedly.

‘Yes, but we weren’t doing anything,’ said Faye, ‘worse luck, keeping our noses clean…’

‘I’ll come down,’ said Jim. ‘I’d like to. Fucking pigs.’ And he spoke sorrowfully, genuinely, so that Faye and Roberta looked at him, curious, and Bert said, ‘The police were here tonight.’

‘Just as well we weren’t then,’ said Roberta.

‘Alice handled them. A marvel she is,’ said Pat, but not as friendlily as she would if the two girls had not come in and split allegiances.

Ruined everything, Alice thought bitterly, surprising herself. A moment before she had been thinking: Here am I, fussing about a house, when they are doing something serious.

‘Oh well,’ said Faye, dismissing the police’s visit to the house as unimportant compared to the real issues, ‘I’m off to sleep, if we’re going to get up early tomorrow.’

The two women stood up. Roberta was looking at Philip, who still sat there, apart, as if waiting. ‘You staying here tonight?’ she asked, and Philip looked at Alice. She said, ‘I’ve told Philip he can live here.’ She heard the appeal in her voice, knew she had her look, knew she might simply break down and weep.

Roberta’s body had subtly changed, hardened, looked affronted, though she had made sure her face was impartial. Philip seemed as if he were sustaining invisible blows.

Roberta looked at Bert, eyebrows raised. Bert’s gaze back was non-committal. He was not going to take sides. Again Alice thought, He’s not up to much! He’s no good.

Alice looked at Pat, and saw something there that might save the position. Pat was waiting for Bert; yes, something had been said, discussed, when she was not there. A decision?

Pat said, since Bert did not, ‘Philip, Alice can’t make decisions as an individual. Alice, you know that! We’ve got to have a real discussion.’ Here she glanced at Jim, who at once said, ‘I was here before any of you, this was my house.’ He sounded wild, was wild, dangerous, all his smiling amiability gone. ‘I said to you, come in, this is Liberty Hall, I said.’ Here was a point of principle. Alice recognized it. She thought: It’s Jim who will save Philip! – Jim was going on, ‘And then I hear, “You’ve got to leave here, this is not your place!” How come? I don’t get it.’

Roberta and Faye stood up. Roberta said, ‘We should call a real meeting and discuss it, properly.’

Philip stood up. He said, ‘I’ve been working here for two days. The fifty pounds wouldn’t pay for the cable I’ve used.’

Alice looked wildly at Jasper. Who was waiting on Bert. Who smiled calmly, white teeth and red lips glistening in the black beard.

Pat stood up. She said curtly, disappointed in Bert, ‘I see no reason at all why Philip shouldn’t stay. Why shouldn’t he? And Jim was here before any of us. Well, I’m going to bed. If we go to the picket tomorrow, then we should be up by eight at the latest.’

‘I’m coming to the picket,’ said Philip.

Alice drew in her breath, and stopped a wail. She said, ‘I’ll have the money. I’ll have it by tomorrow night.’

Philip gave a little disappointed laugh. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘And that isn’t the point. If I was going to take my stand on money, then I wouldn’t be here at all.’

‘Of course not,’ said Pat. ‘Well, let’s all go down tomorrow.’ She yawned and stretched energetically and sensually, with a look at Bert, who responded by getting up, and putting his arm round her.

Oh no, thought Alice, not again.

Roberta and Faye went out, holding hands. Good-night. Good-night.

Bert and Pat went out, close.

Jasper went out after them; and Alice heard him run noisily up the stairs.

Alice said to Philip, and to Jim, ‘It’ll be all right.’

Philip said, ‘But you can’t say it is, not as an individual.’

‘No,’ said Jim. He had lost his wild anger. Was his sane, smiling self. But Alice thought: If we throw him out, he’s going to come back one night and wreck the place. Or something like that. She was surprised that the others hadn’t seen this, felt it.

Philip said to Alice, taking a stand where, she knew, he had often made himself do it before, ‘I won’t be working here tomorrow, I’m going with the others. After all, the fight against the capitalists is more important than our comfort.’ No pay, no work! He walked out and could be heard pounding up the stairs.

Jim went without saying good-night and took refuge in his room. There began the sound of his drums, soft, emotional, like a threat.

Alice was alone. She went around the room putting out the candles, and then stood letting the dark settle so that she could see in the uneven darkness, where the shoulder of a chair, the hard edge of a table, took shape. She was thinking: The very next thing I do will be…

As she left the room, she was worrying: Has Jasper taken his things to another room – and her heart seemed to give way. For, if he was going to shut her out, then, with Bert here, she knew she would find it hard to keep the connection with him that was the meaning and purpose of her life. He would not leave her, she knew that; but he could seem to go very far away.

She went into the hall, now so empty and so large with no one in it, and put out the light. She went up the stairs in the dark, feeling the worn carpet slippery under her feet, and to the landing where the doors were behind which were disposed the others; Philip too, in the little room beyond the large one Roberta and Faye had taken. Jim always slept downstairs, where his music was – and for another thing it was easy to jump out of a window there, and run for it, if necessary.

She opened the door into the room where, she saw with relief that made her knees go soft, Jasper lay curled against the wall, a grub-like shape in the half-dark. Her sleeping-bag lay on the same wall as his; he had been known, in the past, to move it. She slid straight in, fully dressed.

‘Jasper?’ she said.

‘What is it?’

‘Good-night, then.’

He said nothing. They both 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…