Doris Lessing - Doris Lessing

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 it looked bloody evil."

"Yes," agreed Bert. "Epitomises 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 have 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 with the really big issues, "I'm off to sleep, if we are 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 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 noncommittal: 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 recognised 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 grublike 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 Meltings, with her two pretty infants in the big green garden, full now of spring flowers and forsythia.