Doris Lessing - The Good Terrorist

Meanwhile, back in the beautiful flat, they were discussing Alice. Anthony kept up a humorous quizzical look, until Theresa responded with, ‘What is it, my love?’

‘Some girl ,’ he said, the dislike he felt for Alice sounding in his voice.

‘Yes, yes, I know…’ she said irritably – her exhaustion was beginning to tell.

‘A girl – how old is she now?’

She shrugged, not wanting to be bothered with it, but interested, all the same. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘One keeps forgetting.’

‘Nearly forty?’ insisted Anthony.

‘Oh no, she can’t be!’

A pause, while the steam from the plate of soup he had brought her, and had set on the little table beside her, ascended between them. Through the steam, they looked at each other.

‘Thirty-five, no thirty-six,’ she said flatly at last.

‘Arrested development,’ said Anthony firmly, insisting on his right to dislike Alice.

‘Oh yes, I expect so, but darling Alice, well, she’s a sweet girl – a sweet thing, really.’

In Alice’s little street the houses were full of lights and people, the kerbs crammed with cars of the returned from work; and her house loomed at the end, dark, powerful, silent, mysterious, defined by the lights and the din of the main road beyond. As she arrived at the gate, she saw three figures about to go into the dark entrance. Jasper, Bert. And the third? – Alice ran up, and Jasper and Bert turned sharply to face possible danger, saw her, and said to the boy they had with them, ‘Philip, it is all right, this is Alice. Comrade Alice, you know.’ They were in the hall, and Alice saw this was not a boy, but a slight, pale young man, with great blue eyes between sheaves of glistening pale hair that seemed to reflect all the dim light from the hurricane lamp. Her first reaction was, But he’s ill, he’s not strong enough! For she had understood this was her saviour, the restorer of the house.

Philip said, facing her, with a stubbornness she recognized as the result of effort, a push against odds, ‘But I’ve got to charge for it. I can’t do it for nothing.’

‘Fifty pounds,’ said Alice, and saw a slight involuntary movement towards her from Jasper, which told her that he would have it off her, if she wasn’t careful.

Philip said, in the same soft, stubborn voice, ‘I want to see the job first. I have to cost it.’

She knew that this one had often been cheated out of what was due to him. Looking as he did, a brave little orphan, he invited it! She said, maternally and proudly, ‘We’re not asking for favours. This is a job.’

‘For fifty pounds,’ said Bert, with jocular brutality, ‘you can just about expect to get a mousehole blocked up. These days.’ And she saw his red lips gleam in the black thickets of his face. Jasper sniggered.

This line-up of the two men against her – for it was momentarily that – pleased her. She had even been thinking as she raced home that if Bert turned out to be one of the men that Jasper attached himself to, as had happened before, like a younger brother, showing a hungry need that made her heart ache for him, then he wouldn’t be off on his adventures. These always dismayed her, not out of jealousy – she insisted fiercely to herself, and sometimes to others – but because she was afraid that one day there might be a bad end to them. Once or twice men encountered by Jasper during these excursions into a world that he might tell her about, his grip tightening around her wrist as he bent to stare into her face looking for signs of weakness, had arrived at this squat or that, to be met by her friendly, sisterly helpfulness.

‘Jasper? He’ll be back this evening. Do you want to wait for him?’ But they went off again. But when there was a man around, like Bert, to whom he could attach himself, then he did not go off cruising. A word she herself used casually. ‘Were you cruising last night, Jasper? Do be careful, you know it’s bad enough with Old Bill on our backs for political reasons.’ This was the hold she had over him; the check she could use. He would reply in a proud, comradely voice, ‘You are quite right, Alice. But I know my way around.’ And he might give her one of his sudden, real smiles, rare enough, that acknowledged they were allies in a desperate war.

Now she smiled briefly at Jasper and Bert, and turned her attention to Philip. ‘The most important thing,’ she said, ‘is the lavatories. I’ll show you.’

She took him to the downstairs lavatory, holding the lamp high as they stood in the doorway. Since the day the Council workmen had poured concrete into the lavatory bowl, the little room had been deserted. It was dusty, but normal.

‘Bastards,’ she burst out, tears in her voice.

He stood there, undecided; and she saw it was up to her.

‘We need a kango hammer,’ she said. ‘Have you got one?’ She realized he hardly knew what it was. ‘You know, like the workmen use to break up concrete on the roads, but smaller.’

He said, ‘I think I know someone who’d have one.’

‘Tonight,’ she said. ‘Can you get it tonight ?’

This was the moment, she knew, when he might simply go off, desert her, feeling – as she was doing – the weight of that vandalized house; but she knew, too, that as soon as he got started…She said quickly, ‘I’ve done this before. I know. It’s not as bad as it looks.’ And, as he stood there, his resentful, reluctant pose telling her that he again felt put upon, she pressed, ‘I’ll see you won’t lose by it. I know you are afraid of that. I promise.’ They were close together in the doorway of the tiny room. He stared at her from the few inches’ distance of their sudden intimacy, saw this peremptory but reassuring face as that of a bossy but kindly elder sister, and suddenly smiled, a sweet candid smile, and said, ‘I’ve got to go home, ring up my friend, see if he’s at home, see if he’s got a – a kango, borrow Felicity’s car…’ He was teasing her with the enormity of it all.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Please.’

He nodded, and in a moment had slipped out of the front door, and was gone. When she went into the sitting-room where Jasper and Bert were, waiting – as they showed by how they sat, passive and trusting – for her to accomplish miracles, she said with confidence, ‘He’s gone to get some tools. He’ll be back.’

She knew he would; and within the hour he was, with a bag of tools, the kango, battery, lights, everything.

The concrete in the bowl, years old, was shrinking from the sides and was soon broken up. Soon, scratched and discoloured, the lavatory stood usable. Usable if the water still ran. But a lump of concrete entombed the main water tap. Gently, tenderly, Philip cracked off this shell with his jumping, jittering, noisy drill, and the tap appeared, glistening with newness. Philip and Alice, laughing and triumphant, stood close together over the newly-born tap.

‘I’ll see that all the taps are off, but leave one on,’ she said softly; for she wanted to make sure of it all before announcing victory to those two who waited, talking politics, in the sitting-room. She ran over the house, checking taps, came running down. ‘After four years, if there’s not an airlock…’ She appealed to Philip. He turned the main tap. Immediately a juddering and thudding began in the pipes, and she said, ‘Good. They’re alive. ’ And he went off to check the tanks, while she stood in the hall, thankful tears running off her cheeks.

In a couple of hours, the water was restored, the three lavatories cleared, and in the hall was a group of disbelieving and jubilant communards who, returning from various parts of London, had been told what was going on, and on the whole, disbelieved. Out of – Alice hoped – shame.