Doris Lessing - Doris Lessing

Philip and Jim were out. Roberta and Faye were asleep or at their women's place. Mary and Reggie had gone away for a long weekend, and would not be back until evening. Bert and Jasper slept, or were very silent, in their respective rooms. Alice sat on at the end of the table, in the quiet kitchen. The cat, absent for days, reappeared on the window sill, was let in, accepted cornflakes and milk, carefully licked up every little smear from the dish, miaowed, and went away again.

Alice was full of woe. This business of the IRA had been Jasper's impetus for months. Long before the dramatic exit from her mother's, it had been the IRA... the IRA... every day. She had not at first taken it seriously. But then had had to. Now all that had collapsed. Distributing pamphlets and leaflets was not going to satisfy Jasper. Nor, she was sure, Bert, whom she had seen yesterday for the first time as a potentially responsible comrade. Never once had it crossed Jasper's or Bert's mind that they might be refused. Would not be found good enough. The IRA had not taken Jasper and Bert seriously? Making herself examine this thought, slowly and properly turning it around in her mind, re-creating the scene she could see so vividly of Jasper and Bert with the two IRA, she had to admit that Jasper and Bert had made a bad impression. Well, it could happen! It did happen, with Jasper, all the time.

Another possibility was that they, Jasper and Bert and the others - herself included - would be tested. Yes, that could be it. An eye would be kept on them, without their knowing. (Comrade Andrew here appeared powerfully before Alice, and she smiled at the image.) But certainly Jasper and Bert had not thought this; and the Irish comrades had not given them anything specific to do.

This meant - Alice faced it - a bad few days with Jasper. She would not be seeing much of him. He would be gone from here, perhaps returning briefly at night for some food, then off again. Once, in a very bad patch, Jasper had been like that for weeks, over a month, and she had lived in terror for the knock of the police at the door, and news about Jasper she had been dreading since she had first met him. When he was like that, he was not careful about much.

The only hope was his link with Bert. Steadying. Bert might save the situation without ever knowing that one existed.

A couple of hours passed, her spirits sinking lower, and then Philip came in, pleased, to say that his chum at the yard, with contacts where demolition work was going on, had all that 43 needed, and it was in a van outside. But Philip had spent the three hundred pounds and needed money to pay for delivery. Just as he was saying all this, while he and she crossed the hall, Jasper appeared, running lightly down the stairs. Alice stood still to watch him, her heart lifting. She always forgot, when she had not seen him for some time, how he affected her. That lightness of his - each step as though he might take off altogether! - and then how he stood there, at the foot of the stairs, straight and slender; you'd think he was from another world, he was so pale and fine, with his glistening cropped hair.... But he was scowling most horribly. Under his gaze she had to go to the sitting room where she had slept, while he knew why she went and knelt by the sleeping bag, which was only just out of his line of sight. She was risking that he might come in; and she had the disconnected, breathless, out-of-control feeling that was fatal with Jasper. He would realise she had come here for money. What was she to do? She quickly thrust what remained of the one package, together with the fat whole package, down her shirt, where it was visible. She put on a jacket, though he would know why she had the jacket on, and went out under his cold, furious, dissecting gaze. Bert had appeared on the stairs, looking tired and demoralised. What a contrast, Jasper and Bert: one like an avenging angel - the thought came compulsively into her mind - the other so brought down and weakened.

Philip said cheerfully to the two men, "Could you give me a hand?" Jasper did not move. Bert did not move.

Ashamed for them, Alice said, "I'll come," and ran out with Philip. The driver, Philip, and she wrestled with the tank. It was heavy, and large - "The size of a small skip!" she joked - but they got it out of the van and up the path and into the house. There the driver said his responsibility ended. Philip ran out to fetch the guttering and the pipe and came in again. Bert and Jasper were in the kitchen, and the door was shut against her. She went straight in and said to them, "For shit's sake, can't you help us take the things up the stairs?"

They had been communicating disapproval, anger behind that closed door. Now Jasper said, "Alice, you've gone crazy, do you know that? What do you think you are doing? What is all that junk?" She made herself stand up to him: "The water tank up there is rotten, it's rusting. Do you want God knows how many gallons of water cascading down all over us?"

"I don't care," said Jasper. "If it does we'll just move on, as we always do."

This cold cruel treachery reached her guts, made her eyes go dark. When she recovered, she was holding on to the edge of the table for balance. She looked at him, ignoring Bert, who was putting on the kettle, cutting bread. "You know you like a decent place, somewhere nice. Of course you do...."

"Oh, bullshit," he said, melodramatic because she was destroying the image he liked to present to Bert. "Well, I'm not having anything to do with it. And what is it costing? What have we spent this time?" His little blue bright eyes, hard and round, which seemed this morning to be protruding out of the shallow creamy lakes around them, were full of hate for her. She knew what she had to expect the moment they were alone.

She appealed to Bert: "Please help. Philip and I can't manage. I mean, look at Philip!"

Slowly, with no change of expression, Bert buttered bread, then sat down. Then, glancing up and seeing her face, unexpectedly got up, as quick and full of energy as he had just been lethargic (but it was the energy of anger) and came out with her into the hall, where Philip, frail as a leaf, was standing by the great dark-grey water tank. Without a word, Bert bent and lifted, leaving Alice and Philip to fit themselves in, and, with him banging and bumping because he was so angry, the white teeth now showing between red lips stretched in a grimace of effort, the tank was raced upstairs, with much damage to the banisters. On the top floor, Bert simply dumped the tank, and ran down again. She and Philip heard the kitchen door slam again, excluding both of them. She looked apologetically at Philip. He was not looking at her. The tank had to go at the end of the little landing. The existing tank was in the attic. There was no way this tank could get through the trap door into the attic. Mystery! How did the first builders think a new tank would get itself up there, when the original tank, presumably put in before the roof went on, reached its natural end? They could only have believed that tanks had eternal lives.

But the distance from where the tank now sat, blocking the way at the head of the stairs, and where it had to be was too great for them to shift it.

Alice saw Philip distressed, ashamed, vulnerable.

"You wait," she said. She marched down the stairs, and saw Jasper coming out of the sitting room, where, of course, he had been searching for her money. Standing on the bottom step, she said, not knowing she was going to, "I've had enough, Jasper. If you can't help with a little thing like this, when I do so much, then I'm quitting."

Just as though he had not been going to walk past into the kitchen, he wheeled, and pounded up the stairs in front of her. When she got there, he was moving the tank with Philip to where it had to go. Here was the other Jasper, quick, intelligent, resourceful. For Philip said that board, thick papers, something, should be put under the tank to raise it, because of some tricky protruding pipes, and Jasper, seeing the stacks of newspaper that had come down from the attic, swiftly gathered them up and built them, while he knelt there beside it, into an eighteen-inch-high platform. Alice could see that though he slid the papers into place so swiftly, he was dealing to one side, as in a card game, newspapers with headlines of interest: "The Jarrow Marchers..."