The Good Terrorist Read online

  She accepted a bottle of beer from Bert, who gave her, with it, the thumbs-up sign, and soon they were all sitting in a close group, in the centre of the tall room. Candle-lit: there had not been time to put a bulb in. But Philip had sat down a little apart, and tentatively.

  “First,” said Pat, “to Alice!”

  They drank to her, and she sat silent, smiling, afraid she would cry.

  Now, she thought, I’ll bring up Philip. I’ll bring up Jim. We’ll get it settled.

  But in the hall, suddenly, were voices, laughter, and in a moment the two girls came in, lit with the exaltation that comes from a day’s satisfactory picketing and demonstrating and marching.

  Roberta, laughing, came over to the carrier of bottles and put one to her mouth, and drank standing, swallowing the beer down, then handed the bottle to Faye, who did the same.

  “What a day,” said Roberta, and she let herself slide onto the arm of a chair, while Faye sat on the other. A couple apart, they surveyed the rest, as adventurers do stay-at-homes, and began their tale, Roberta leading, Faye filling in.

  It was a question of the two or three hundred picketers—numbers had varied, as people came and went—preventing vans with newspapers from getting through the gates to distribute them. The police had been there to see the vans safely through.

  “Two hundred police,” said Roberta, scornfully. “Two hundred fucking police!”

  “More police than picketers,” said Faye, laughing, and Roberta watched her, fondly. Faye, animated and alive, was really very pretty. Her look of listlessness, even depression, had gone. She seemed to sparkle in the dim room.

  “I had to stop Faye from getting carried away,” said Roberta. “Otherwise she’d have been out there. Of course, with both of us having to keep a low profile …”

  “Were there arrests?”

  “Five,” said Roberta. “They got Gerry. He didn’t go quietly, though.”

  “I should say not,” said Faye proudly.

  “Who else?”

  “Didn’t know the others. They were the Militant lot, I think.”

  A pause. Alice knew she had lost her advantage, and felt discouraged. And, seeing Jasper’s face as he watched the two campaigning girls, she was thinking: He’ll be off down there tomorrow, if I know anything.

  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 Mellings, with her two pretty infants in the big green garden, full now of spring flowers and forsythia.

  Alice came to life, ran downstairs, snatched up her jacket, and was out of the house and into the street, where people were starting up cars to go to work. As she ran she thought: The dustmen said they would come! But she would only be gone an hour: They won’t come so early—but how do I know? If they come and find no one there … All the same she kept on running, thinking: But they won’t come yet, I just know they won’t.

  She panted into the Underground, snatched a ticket from the machine, belted down the stairs, and there was a fortuitous train. Alice was not surprised, knowing that things were going her way this morning. She fidgeted as she stood on the crowded train, ran up the stairs at the other end, ran, ran along the leafy avenues, and then she came to a stop outside her father’s house, which was no more than half a mile from her mother’s.

  In the garden she saw, not at all to her surprise, Jane, her father’s new wife, sitting on the lawn, on a large red-and-green-striped blanket, with two little scraps of children, on whose fair heads the sun glistened.

  Alice removed her eyes from the scene, as if her gaze might have the power to force Jane to look at her. Alice went straight up the path to the front door, found it locked, went round the house to the back. She was in full view of Jane if she had only turned her head. Alice walked into the kitchen, which made her heart ache, being large, and with that great wooden table set with bowls of fruit and flowers, which for Alice was the symbol of happiness.

  Alice ran into the hall and up the stairs, thinking that if her father was late today going to work—only he never was—she would say: Oh, hello, Dad, there you are! She opened the door into their bedroom calmly, and saw, as she expected, the large marriage bed, which had on it thrown-back duvets, and Jane’s nightdress (scarlet silk, Alice noted, severely), her father’s pyjamas, a child’s striped woolly ball, and a teddy bear.

  She went straight to the sliding doors behind which her father’s clothes were hanging. Neatly: her father was a methodical man. She went through his pockets, knowing she would find something, for it had been a joke, in their house, that Dorothy Mellings found money in his pockets, and made a point of using it on luxuries. He would say—Alice’s father—“Right, come clean, what have you spent it on?” And Alice’s mother would say, “Brandied peaches.” Or marrons glacés, or Glenfiddich whisky.

  Alice’s hands darted in and out of the pockets and she was praying, Dear God, let there be some money, let there be, let there be a lot. Her fingers felt a soft thick wad and she brought it out, not believing in her luck. A thick soft pack of notes. Ten-pound notes. She slid them into her breast pocket, and was out of the room, down the stairs, and then through the kitchen into the back garden. She hardly paused to see whether Jane was safely looking the other way. Alice knew she would be.

  Alice was out of the house and in the road and then out of sight of the house in a minute. There she stood, back to the road, facing into a tall hedge, and counted the notes. She could not believe it. It was true. Three hundred pounds.

  Well, he would miss that sum: it wasn’t just a jar of fucking bloody ginger, or peaches. Three hundred pounds: he would think she had stolen it—Jane had. Let him. A cold sour pleasure filled Alice, and she slid the notes back and began running. The dustmen!

  Three-quarters of an hour after she had left, she was back at the house, and she saw the rubbish van turn in from the main road.

  She knew, she knew that all would go well, and stood smiling, her pounding heart sending the blood hissing through her ears.

  From the rubbish van jumped the same three men, who, having acknowledged her there, began to hump the black shining sacks. Not a word about the rain that squelched in the sacks with the rubbish.

  It took them twenty minutes or so, by which time Joan Robbins had come out to stand at her door, arms folded, watching. And who else was watching? Alice did not look, but made a point of going to the hedge to speak to Joan Robbins and smile: neighbours and a little gossip, that’s what observers would see; and then she stood at the gate from which the last black bag had been taken, and put into the hand of Alan the driver the sum of fifteen pounds, with the smile of a householder. And went indoors. It was just after ten in the morning. And the day lay ahead, and it would be filled every minute, with useful activity. It would, once she had started. For she had run out of steam. Now she was thinking of them, her friends, her family, who would by now be down at the Melstead works, would have blended with the others, would be standing taking the measure of the police, would be walking confidently about, exchanging remarks the police would have to hear and ignore—ignore until they got their own back later.

  Bert and Jasper and Pat, Jim and Philip, Roberta and Faye—she hoped those two would be careful. Well, they were all politically mature; they would know how far they could go. Jasper? Jasper had not been in a confrontation for a long time; for one thing, he had only just finished being bound over. It was not that she wanted him safe, but that she wanted things done right. Jasper was wild, had been bound over once for two years, and not for anything useful—as she judged it—but because of carelessness.

  Alice sat by herself, the large shabby sitting room comfortably about her, and thought that she was hungry. She did not have the energy to go out again. Against the wall was a crumpled carrier bag, and in it, a loaf of bread and some salami. God knew how long that had been there, but she didn’t care. She sat eating, slowly, careful of crumbs. For this room
, she would need help: it was so large and the ceilings so tall. But the kitchen … It took an hour or so to get herself going; she was really tired. Besides, she was enjoying mentally spending the money that she could feel in a large soft lump just under her heart. Then she did pull herself up, and went into the kitchen. Filling buckets with—unfortunately—cold water, she began to work. Swabbing down ceilings, walls, while she manoeuvred the stepladder around the cooker, which still lay on its side on the floor. At one point she knew that tears were running down her cheeks—she had been thinking of the others, all together, shouting in unison, “Thatcher out, out, out!,” shouting “Blacklegs out, out, out!”

  She could hear them chant, “The workers united shall never be defeated!”

  She thought how one of them—Philip, yes, she thought, Philip—would go off to a pub and buy sandwiches and beer for all of them. There might even be a mobile canteen by now; there ought to be, the picket had been going on for some time.

  She thought of how the atmosphere would get thick and electric, and how when the armoured vans—the symbol of everything they loathed—started to move, the crowd would struggle together and become like a wall against which the police …

  Alice wept a little, aloud, snuffling and gulping, as she stood swabbing the floor. If they decided that Philip could not stay here, then … those tiles on the roof, those tiles …

  Round about four in the afternoon the kitchen was scrubbed, not a smear of dust or grit anywhere. The big table stood where it ought, with its heavy wooden chairs around it, and on it a glass jam jar with some jonquils out of the garden. Only the poor cooker lay on its side, a reminder of disorder. Alice thought that she would get on a train and go down to the others—she had a right to it, she was the veteran of a hundred battles—but sat down for a rest in the sitting room and fell asleep, and woke to find the others noisily crowding in, laughing and talking, elated and full of accomplishment.