Doris Lessing - Doris Lessing

Then Pat suggested all kinds of little treats that Alice would never have thought of for herself.

They went to tea at the Savoy, for a start. Pat treated Alice. Pat wore a very smart black wool dress embroidered with bright wools she had bought at a jumble sale, and looked more striking, more fashionable than any other woman in the great pillared, gilded, romantic Savoy. Alice wore a skirt, but otherwise was as usual. They ate a lot, and Pat was fussy about her tea. They came out like successful buccaneers.

Then they spent a morning in Harrods, buying with their eyes. Rather, Pat did: Alice did not care about luxury, but she enjoyed Pat's enjoyment. Again Pat wore this best dress of hers, the dramatic black wool, which made her, with her vivid glossy colouring, seem exotic, un-English. Then, next day, with the rain easing off, they went to Regent's Park and walked about among puddles and lilacs and flowering cherries.

Then Pat said she must go back home. She said "home," Alice noted.

She said to Pat, "Will you come down again? Soon?"

Pat looked self-conscious, laughed, and said, "Alice, I don't think we will be seeing each other again. Well, perhaps. And yet again, perhaps not..." She was making a joke of it, in her way, but her eyes sent messages of regret.

"Why?" demanded Alice. "But why, why, why?"

Pat sobered, and said, "Alice, I keep telling you, I am serious, unlike those two bloody lunatics of ours."

And with this she kissed Alice, tears in her eyes, and went off, running, to the tube. Out - Alice could see - of her life.

Alice slept on this, too, but did not feel enlightened when she woke in the morning. Perhaps she did not want to be.

She seemed to have lost impetus, did not feel like doing anything. Joan Robbins was in her garden. Alice stood talking with her for a time. Among other things, she learned that the two houses had been empty for six years. "Well, not exactly empty," said Joan Robbins, embarrassed; and went on to talk of the people who had been there before the Council had commandeered the homes, families with children, grandparents, many visitors. They had been keen gardeners; the two gardens had been wonderful.

Soon some kind of social worker arrived and brought the old lady down to sit in the garden. Alice talked to her, too. As always when she stepped out of her own life, into the world of ordinary people, she felt divided, confused. Thus had she felt all the time she lived with Jasper in her mother's house; it was why she had not wanted to stay there, was always pressing Jasper to leave. Now, after weeks with her own kind, comrades of one sort or another, her belief that her kind of life was the only one (for her now, for everybody later) was strengthened. Joan Robbins seemed to her pathetic, fussing over her clematis with fungicides and sprays; the old woman was half demented, and driving Joan Robbins crazy with continual demands. Alice, thinking firmly, "Life simply oughtn't to be like this!," went back to number 43, and there on the doorstep was Caroline from next door. She had a packet for Alice. She handed it over, said no, she wouldn't come in, and went off to the bus stop. Alice looked into the packet. It was money. Inside the hall she quickly counted it. Five hundred. With a note from Muriel, saying, "Comrade Andrew said this was for you."

Alice slid the packet into her sleeping bag, and went to number 45. As she arrived, Muriel was coming out, with a suitcase. But at first Alice did not recognise her.

She saw then that Muriel was not happy to see her, that she had probably counted on going off before Alice got there.

Alice said, "I must talk to you."

Muriel said, "I don't think I have got anything to say."

They went quickly into the room used by Comrade Andrew, which had become a bedroom, for there were four sleeping bags arranged along the wall.

Muriel stood in the centre of the room, waiting for Alice to get on with it. Her suitcase stood beside her.

Muriel was not wearing battle dress today, or anything like it, but a very well cut linen suit in blue. From Harrods. Alice had seen it there the day before yesterday.

Muriel had her hair in the Princess Diana sheepdog cut.

Alice knew that Muriel was an upper-class girl and this was why she disliked her so much. She, like all her kind, had this decisive putting-down manner, implicit in every word and glance. Alice, at her democratic progressive school, which was full of such girls, had decided in the first week that she loathed them and always would.

Another thought well to the forefront of her mind was that Comrade Andrew had had an affair with Muriel because of the attraction of such girls for working-class people who professed to despise them.

"Why did Comrade Andrew leave this money for me?"

"It is nothing to do with me. Nothing at all," said Muriel, as cuttingly and definitively as Alice expected.

"He must have said something."

The two young women were standing facing each other in the large room, full of light, and also of traffic noise from the main road.

"Damn this bloody traffic," said Muriel, and went to the windows, one, two, three, shutting each with a slam.

She returned to stand opposite Alice, having in the interval (which was why she had gone to the windows) made up her mind what to say.

Alice forestalled her with, "What am I supposed to do in return?"

At this Comrade Muriel showed a nicely controlled irritation.

"That you would have to discuss with Comrade Andrew, wouldn't you?"

"But he's not here. When is he coming back?"

"I don't know. If he doesn't come, there will be someone else." And, since Alice remained obstinately confronting her, she defined the situation as she saw it: "Alice, you are either with us or against us."

"I'd be with you - with Comrade Andrew - without the money, wouldn't I?"

"Or do you simply want to go on being one of the useful idiots?"

Alice did not react to this, remained in her stance of infinitely patient, dogged enquiry.

"Lenin," said Muriel. "A useful idiot: vague and untutored enthusiasm for communism. For the Soviet Union. Fellow travellers. You know."

Alice had in fact hardly read Lenin. She felt for him a kind of bowing down of her whole person, like a genuflexion, as to the Perfect Man. That such a giant can have lived! was her feeling, and it was enough. If it came to that, she had read not much more of Marx than the Communist Manifesto. She had always said of herself, "Well, I am not an intellectual!" - with a feeling of superiority.

Now she felt that the goose-girl was being irrelevant, as well as offensive.

"I do not believe that Comrade Lenin despised people who sincerely admired the achievements of the working class in the communist countries," said Alice, every bit as decisively, as authoritatively, as Comrade Muriel. Who was silent, gazing at Alice with slightly protuberant, light-blue eyes.

She then remarked, "Comrade Andrew thinks highly of your potential."

The flash of delight that went through Alice made her impervious to anything Muriel might be thinking. She said humbly, "I'm glad."

"Well, that's it, I think," said Muriel, and picked up her case.

"You're off to start your career of crime, then?" said Alice, and laughed heartily at what she'd said. Muriel politely smiled, but she was furious.

"I expect it is the BBC," said Alice thoughtfully. "Or something like that," she added hastily.

At this, Muriel stood for a moment, with her case in her hand, then she set it down, came a step nearer to Alice, and said deliberately, "Alice, you do not ask such questions. You - do - not - ask - such - questions. Do you understand?"

Alice felt herself in the grip of the dreamy knowing state that she had trusted in all her life. "But first I suppose you are off to one of those spy schools in Czechoslovakia or Lithuania," she remarked.