The Good Terrorist

In the hall, the two desperadoes were just about to go out into the world of the streets, gardens, neighbours, cats, cars and sparrows.

They looked just like everybody, thought Alice, seeing them turn round, the pretty fair Faye, delicate inside the almost tangible protective ambience of swarthy Roberta, as strong as a tank – as strong as I am, thought Alice, standing there, looking, she knew, like a clown who has just been showered with flour.

‘Well,’ said Faye, humorous, and Roberta commented, ‘Well,’ and the two women laughed, and went out of the door as though all this hard work had nothing to do with them.

‘No good expecting anything,’ said Alice to herself, stoically, after so much experience of those who did and those who wouldn’t. Again she went up to the bathroom and stood naked in desolation, while the bath filled with cold water to the level of the grime mark that showed where she had done all this earlier that day. And again she stood in cold water endeavouring to rid herself of the dirt, her mother’s daughter, thinking viciously of the four years she had lived inside her mother’s house, where hot water came obediently at a touch. They don’t know what it costs, she was muttering, furiously. It all comes from the workers, from us…

She did her best; she put on a nice neat skirt, which she had purloined from her mother, with a joke that it suited her better: she needed a skirt sometimes for respectability, some types of people were reassured by it. She put on another of the little neat-collared shirts, in blue cotton this time, that made her feel herself. She did her best with her hair, which felt greasy and gritty, although she had stood with it held down in a bucket of the unyielding cold water. Then she went into the sitting-room. Pat, relaxed in a big armchair, was asleep. Alice went quietly up and stared down at this unknown woman, who was her ally. She was thinking: She won’t leave yet. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t think much of Bert, she’s going to stay because of all that love.

Pat lay sprawling all over the chair as if she had dropped down off the ceiling. Her head was back, her face lifted and exposed. Eyes, lips trembled on the verge of opening. Alice expected her to wake, and smile. But Pat stayed asleep, vulnerable under Alice’s meticulous inspection of her. Alice continued to stand there, looking. She felt that she possessed Pat, in this look – her life, what she was and would be. Alice could never have allowed herself to sleep like that, open to anyone to come in and look at. It was careless, foolish, like walking about the streets with money held loose in a hand. Alice came closer and bent right down over Pat, to stare at that innocent face with its lightly-shuttered eyes behind which an inhabitant had gone off into that unknown country. Alice felt curious. What was she dreaming about, looking like a baby that has just napped off after a bottle? Alice began to feel protective, wanting Pat to wake up in case the others should come in and see her, defenceless. Then Alice thought, Well, it will probably be Bert, won’t it? Sleeping Beauty! Now it was scorn that she felt, because of Pat’s need. If she’s got to have it, she’s got to have it, said Alice judiciously to herself, making necessary allowances. And stepped lightly out of the sitting-room, through the hall, and into the outside world. It was about three o’clock on a fresh and lively spring afternoon. She took the bus to Electricity, with confidence.

Electricity was a large modern building, set well back from the main road where seethed, in cars and on foot, the lively polyglot needy people whose lives it supported with light, boiling kettles, energetic vacuum cleaners…power. The building looked conscious of its role: nearly a million people depended on it. It stood solid and dependable. Its windows flashed. The cars of its functionaries stood in biddable lines, gleaming.

Alice ran lightly up the steps and, knowing her way from having been in so many similar buildings, went straight to the first floor where she knew she was in the right place, because there was a room where ten or so people waited. Unpaid bills, new accounts, threats of disconnection: a patient little crowd of petitioners. From this room opened two doors, and Alice sat herself so as to be able to see into both rooms. As the doors opened to emit one customer, and admit another, Alice examined the faces of these new arbiters, sitting behind their respective desks. Women. One she knew, after a single glance, she must avoid. The letter-of-the-law, that woman, judged Alice, seeing a certain self-satisfaction in competence. A thin face and lips, neatly waved fair hair, a smile Alice had no intention of earning. But the other woman, yes, she would do, although at first glance…She was large, and her thick tight dress held her solid and secure, performing the function of a corset, but from this fortress of a dress emerged a large soft rather girlish face and large soft hands. Alice adjusted her seat, and in due course found herself sitting in front of this motherly lady who, Alice knew, several times a day stretched things a little because she was sorry for people.

Alice told her story, and described – knowing exactly what she was doing – the large solid house which inexplicably was going to be pulled down so that yet another nasty block of flats could be built. Then she produced her official-looking Council envelope, with the letter inside.

This official, Mrs Whitfield, only glanced at the letter, and said, ‘Yes, but the house is on the agenda, that’s all, it hasn’t been decided.’ She turned up a card in the cabinet beside her, and said, ‘No. 43? I know it. 43 and 45. I walk past them every day to the Underground. They make me feel sick.’ She looked, embarrassed, at Alice and even blushed.

‘We have already begun to clean 43 up. And the dustmen are coming tomorrow to take it all away.’

‘You want me to get the power switched on now before knowing what the Council decides?’

‘I’m sure it’s going to be all right,’ said Alice, smiling. She was sure. Mrs Whitfield saw this, felt it, and nodded.

‘Who is going to guarantee payment? Are you? Are you in work?’

‘No,’ said Alice, ‘not at the moment.’ She began to talk in a calm, serious way about the houses in Manchester, in Halifax, in Birmingham, which had been rescued, where electricity had flowed obediently through wires, after long abstinence. Mrs Whitfield listened, sitting solid in her chair, while her white large hand held a biro poised above a form: Yes. No.

She said, ‘If I order the power to be switched on, first I must have a guarantor.’

‘But do you know that it is only in this borough – well, one or two others. In Lampton, for instance, you’d have to supply electricity to us. If people demand it, then it must be supplied.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Whitfield mildly, ‘you seem to know the situation as well as I do! I do not make policy. I implement it. The policy in this borough is that there has to be a guarantor.’

But her eyes, large, soft and blue, were direct on Alice’s face and not combative or hostile, far from it; she seemed to be appealing for Alice to come up with something.

‘My father will guarantee payment,’ said Alice. ‘I am sure of that.’

Mrs Whitfield had already started to fill in the form. ‘Then that’s all right,’ she said. ‘His name? His address? His telephone number? And we have to have a deposit.’

Alice took out ten pounds and laid it on the desk. She knew it was not enough. Mrs Whitfield looked at it cautiously, and sighed. She did not look at Alice. A bad sign. She did not take the note. Then, she did raise her eyes to Alice’s face, and seemed startled at what she saw there.

‘How many of you are there?’ she asked in a hurried playing-for-time way, glancing at the note, and then making herself confront Alice’s face, that face which could not be denied. It was not fair! Mrs Whitfield seemed to be feeling. They were inappropriate and wrong, these emotions that Alice had brought into this orderly and sensible office. Probably, what Mrs Whitfield should be doing was simply to tell Alice to go away and come back better supplied with evidence of her status as a citizen. Mrs Whitfield could not do this. She could not. Alice saw from how that large smooth confined bosom heaved, from the soft flushed shocked face, that she – Alice – was on the point of getting her way.

‘Very well,’ said Mrs Whitfield at last, and sat for a moment, not so much in doubt now that she had made a decision, but worried. For Alice. ‘Those are big houses,’ she remarked, meaning: they use a lot of electricity.

‘It’ll be all right,’ said Alice, sure that it would be. ‘Can you switch it on this afternoon? We have got an electrician at work. It would be a help…’

Mrs Whitfield nodded. Alice went out, knowing that the official was watching her go, disturbed, probably already wondering why she had given in.

Instead of going straight home, Alice went to the telephone box at the corner and dialled her mother. A voice she did not at first recognize; but it was her mother. That awful flat voice…Alice nearly said, ‘Hello, this is Alice,’ but could not. She gently replaced the receiver and dialled her father. But it was his partner who answered.

She bought a large thermos, which would always be useful, for example on demos or at pickets; asked Fred’s wife to fill it with strong tea, and went home.

The white dusty cloud in the kitchen had subsided. She said to Philip, now crouched on the floor with half the floorboards up, ‘Be careful they might switch it on at any moment.’

‘It is on, I’ve just tested,’ said Philip, and gave her a smile that made it all worth while.

They sat on the great table, drank strong tea and were companionable and happy. It was a large room. Once a family had had its centre here, warm and safe and unfailing. They had sat together around this table. But Alice knew that before all that could begin again, there must be money.

She left Philip, and went to the sitting-room where Pat was awake and no longer lying abandoned and open to Alice’s anxious curiosities. She was reading. It was a novel. By some Russian. Alice knew the author’s name as she did know the names of authors, that is, as if they were objects on a shelf, round, hard and glittering, with a life and a light of their own. Like marbles, that you could turn between your fingers for as long as you liked, but they would not yield, give up their secrets, submit.

Alice never read anything but newspapers.

As a child they had teased her: Alice has a block against books. She was a late reader, not something to be overlooked in that bookish house. Her parents, particularly her mother, all the visitors, everyone she ever met, had read everything. They never stopped reading. Books flowed in and out of the house in tides. ‘They breed on the shelves,’ her parents, and then her brother, happily joked. But Alice was cherishing her block. It was a world she could choose not to enter. One might politely refuse. She persisted, polite but firm, secretly tasting the power she possessed to disquiet her parents. ‘I do not see the point of all that reading,’ she had said; and continued to say, even at university, doing Politics and Economics, mainly because the books she would be expected to read did not have the inaccessible mocking quality of those others. ‘I am only interested in facts,’ she would say during this period when there was no escaping it: a minimum number of books had to be read.

But later she had learned she could not say this. There had always been books of all kinds in the squats and communes. She used to wonder how it was that a comrade with a good, clear and correct view of life could be prepared to endanger it by reading all that risky equivocal stuff that she might dip into, hastily, retreating as if scalded. She had even secretly read almost to the end of one novel recommended as a useful tool in the struggle, but felt as she had as a child: if she persevered, allowing one book to lead her on to another, she might find herself lost without maps.

But she knew the right things to say. Now she remarked about the book Pat was reading: ‘He’s a very fine humanist writer.’

Pat let Laughter in the Dark close and sat thoughtfully regarding Alice.

‘Nabokov, a humanist?’ she asked, and Alice saw that there was serious danger of what she dreaded more than anything, literary conversation.

‘Well, I think so,’ Alice insisted, with a modest smile and the air of one who was prepared to defend an unpopular position reached after long thought. ‘He really cares about people.’

Somebody – some comrade, at some time, in some squat or other, had said as a joke, ‘When in doubt classify them as humanists.’

Pat’s steady, interested, thoughtful look was reminding Alice of something. Of someone. Yes, Zoë Devlin. Thus she would regard Alice when the subject of literature came up and Alice had had no alternative but to make a contribution.

Suddenly, Alice remembered something. Zoë Devlin. Yes.

A quarrel, or at least an argument between Dorothy Mellings and Zoë Devlin. Recently. Not long before Alice left.

Alice was concentrating so hard on what she remembered that she slowly sat down, hardly noticing what she did, and forgetting about Pat.

Her mother had wanted Zoë to read some book or other and Zoë had said no, she thought its view of politics was reactionary.

‘How do you know when you haven’t read it?’ Dorothy had asked, laughing.

‘There are lots of books like that, aren’t there,’ Zoë had said. ‘Probably written by the CIA.’

‘Zoë,’ Dorothy had said, no longer laughing, ‘is that you? Is that Zoë Devlin speaking? My good friend, the fearless, the open-minded, the incorruptible Zoë Devlin?’

‘I hope it is,’ said Zoë, laughing.

‘I hope it is, too,’ said Dorothy, not laughing. ‘Do we still have anything in common, do you think?’