Doris Lessing - Doris Lessing

How dare her mother give these away without even asking her, Alice?

When she went into the kitchen, Philip was there, and she knew from his manner that he had something to say.

It was that he had had printed a leaflet, which he was taking to hotels, restaurants, shops, advertising his firm, Philip Fowler, Builder and Decorator ; that he had to get real work, soon; that he thought he had contributed more than his share to this house, which was now in working order. If "they" wanted him to do any more, then he insisted on being paid; no, of course not at the proper rates, but enough to make it worth it.

The things that still needed to be done here were: Guttering to be replaced. Also a section of exterior drainpipe (he advised that this should be done soon, because the wall was badly soaked, and they were asking for dry rot). The cold-water tank in the attic was almost rusted through. In his opinion it might burst, flooding the house at any moment. The window sills were rotten on the top floor, and were letting in rain. And of course there was the question of the two rotten beams in the attic.

He laid before Alice a list of these necessities in order of urgency, the water tank being first.

Money. She would have to get some.

She sat a long time by herself, looking at the forsythia. It was wilting. Brilliant yellow petals lay on the floor. She went out, cut more branches, threw the dying ones away, and sat on through the afternoon, thinking.

Where was her mother, for a start? Did she imagine she could run away from Alice, just like that? Was she mad? Well, she must be, not telling Alice and Jasper... Here somewhere deep in her mind a thought began tugging and nagging, that her mother had told her. Well, if so, not in such a way that Alice could take it in.

Could she get some money from her mother? Not if she had just moved. With all that expense. Besides, she probably hadn't got over being angry; she needed time to cool down.

How about Theresa and Anthony?

Over this, Alice thought long and intently. Theresa would slip her another fifty pounds, but it wasn't enough. What was the good of fifty pounds? She had got the forty-odd due to her that week from Social Security, and it had melted away on things Philip needed. She thought that if she went there while the maid was cleaning, Theresa and Anthony out at work, she could nick the netsukes if she was quick and clever, and the maid would not notice. But the thought did not stay with her; affection drove it off. Theresa had been so good to her always, she could not do that to Theresa. Anthony was another matter. If it was only Anthony: she would take anything she could get from him!

Zoë Devlin? But for some reason Alice would not go on with that thought. She felt sick, as if Zoë had quarrelled so horribly with her, as well as with her mother.

Perhaps she could actually pick out a suitable house and rob it? Clearly, she was not without talents in that direction. She felt confident that she could succeed.

But to become a thief, a real thief - that was a step away from herself. How could she describe herself as a revolutionary, a serious person, if she was a thief? Besides, if she was caught, it would be bad for the Cause. No. Besides, she had always been honest, had never stolen anything, not even as a child. She had not gone through that period of nicking things out of her mother's handbag, her father's pockets, the way some small children did. Never.

She could imagine herself choosing a likely house, watching for its inhabitants to be out, gliding into it, getting her hands around valuables - after all, she did know what was valuable and what wasn't. She wasn't one of those poor deprived kids who slipped in through an open window or an inadequately locked door and then did not know better than to steal a television or a video. But she could not really see herself with whatever it was: vase or rug or necklace, trying to sell it.

No, that was out.

She had to have money. Look at all these people, taking and taking... though Jim had said proudly last night that now he would contribute properly; he would pay his way, Alice needn't think that he wouldn't.

The only place she could think of was her father's. Not his house: it was too early to try that again. The firm. She sat, eyes shut, visualising the inside of the building that housed C. Mellings, Printers and Stationers. The safe in her father's office downstairs had cheques in it, but she did not want cheques. Downstairs, in the little stationery shop in the back, which her father had started in a small way as a trial and which had become so successful that sometimes he joked it financed everything else, was a safe full of cash. But only in the daytime, when the shop was full of people. Every night the cash was carried upstairs to the other safe. Next morning it was taken to the bank. How was she to get that money? She did not know the combination of the safe, and did not propose to turn professional with explosives, or whatever they used.

No, she needed something else; she needed cheek. It was Friday. They did better business downstairs on Friday than on any other day. The shop closed at five, and then the money was taken straight upstairs to be counted. It stayed in the safe until Monday morning. On Friday evening her father often went home early, because he and Jane and the infants liked to drive into Kent, where they had friends. A real, typical, bourgeois arrangement: Cedric and Jane stayed weekends with the Boults; the Boults would use Cedric and Jane's house for trips into London. Nothing like this had ever happened while Cedric still lived with Dorothy! Of course not. Her mother was too full of mine and thine: you couldn't see her sharing her house with another family. For some reason, this business of the weekends, the visiting Boults, always made Alice weak with anger.

But, with luck, her father would have left at three.

To reach her father's business, she had to go two stops further on the Underground than for her father's house, or her mother's - well, where her mother had been. She walked, deliberately not thinking too much, into the stationer's, where she was greeted, the boss's daughter. She walked through the shop, saying she wanted to see her father, then upstairs to the office floor. People were tidying their desks for the weekend. She said Hello, and How are you, and went into her father's office, where the secretary, Jill, sat in her father's chair, counting money from the till downstairs.

"Oh, he's gone then," said Alice, and sat down. Jill, counting, leafed through ten-pound notes, smiled, nodded, her mouth moving to indicate that she could not stop. Alice smiled and nodded, and got up to stand at the window, looking out. Indolent and privileged, daughter of the establishment, she leaned on the sill, watching the goings-on in the street, and listened to the sounds of paper sliding on paper.

Should she say her father had agreed she should have some money? If she did, Jill could not say no; and then, on Monday, her father, on being told, would not give her away, would not say: My daughter is a thief. She was about to say: He said I could have five hundred pounds. But then it happened, the incredible, miraculous luck that she now expected, since it happened so easily and often: in the next office the telephone rang. Jill counted on. The telephone rang and rang. "Oh, flick it," muttered Jill daintily, for she was the kind of good girl favoured by her father as secretary, and she ran next door to the telephone. Alice saw on the desk that there was a white canvas bag in which stacks of notes had already been put. She slid her hand in, took out a thick wad, then another, put them inside her jacket, and again leaned, her back to the room, at the window. Jill returned, saying that it was Mrs. Mellings, for her father, and it took Alice some moments to realise that this must be her mother, not the new Mrs. Mellings, who at this moment would be already on her way to the pleasures of a weekend in Kent.