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.
Alice, a sleepy creature in the big chair, was humble, even apologetic, as she struggled up to greet them. She felt she had no right to it when food and drink were spread about the floor and she was invited to join.
Then she remembered. She pulled out her thick roll of notes and, laughing, gave £150 to Philip. “On account,” she said.
A silence. They stared. Then they laughed, and began hugging her and one another. Even Jasper put his arm around her briefly as he laughed, and seemed to show her off to the others.
“Better not ask where,” said Roberta, “but congratulations.”
“Honestly gained, I hope,” said Faye primly, and they started again, embracing and laughing, but this was as much, Alice knew, out of the exuberant excesses of emotion from the day’s energetic confrontations with Authority as because they were pleased with her.
“All the same,” said Faye, “we have to come to a group decision,” and Roberta said, “Oh, balls, Faye, come off it. It’s all right.…”
The two women exchanged a look; and Alice knew: they had been discussing it down there, and had disagreed. Bert said briefly, as though it really didn’t matter, and had not mattered: “Yes, as far as I am concerned it is all right.” Jasper echoed, “Yes, I agree.”
Pat said, “Of course it is all right.”
Philip could not speak, for he would have wept; he was shining with relief, with happiness. And Jim: well, he was taking it, Alice could see, as a reprieve; she knew that nothing could ever seem, to Jim, more than a temporary good. But he was pleased enough. There was a warm, good feeling in the room. A family …
The good feeling lasted through the meal, and while Alice took them to the kitchen to show them its cleanliness.
“A wonder, she is,” sang Faye. “Alice the Wonder, the wondrous Alice …” She was tipsy and exhilarated, and everyone enjoyed looking at her.
Without Alice’s asking, Bert and Jasper lifted the cooker upright to stand in its place against the wall.
“I’ll get it properly fixed tomorrow,” said Philip, contentedly.
They went together up the stairs, reluctant to separate for the night, so much of a group did they feel.
Lying along the wall, in the dark, her feet a yard from Jasper’s feet, Alice remarked dreamily, “What have you and Bert decided, then?”
A quick movement from Jasper, which she noted, thinking, I didn’t know I was going to say that.
He was lying stiffly, found out; that was how he had experienced what she had said.
“Oh, I don’t mind, Jasper,” she said, impatient but conciliatory. “But you did discuss it, didn’t you?”
After a pause, “Yes, we did.”
“Well, it does affect us all.”
A pause. Grudgingly, “We thought it mightn’t be a bad thing, having other people here. But they have to be CCU. Jim will have to join.”
“You mean, Philip and Jim will be a cover.”
He said nothing. Silence means consent. She said, “Yes, and of course there’ll be more people coming in, and …”
He said fussily, “You aren’t to let just anyone come, we can’t have just anybody.”
“I didn’t say, just anybody. But the others needn’t ever know we are IRA.”
“Precisely,” said Jasper.
And then she remarked, in her dreamy voice and to her own surprise, “With the comrades in the other house, I wonder …” She stopped. Interested in what she had said. Respectful of it.
But he had shot up on his elbow and was staring at her in the half-dark, where headlamps from the road moved light across the ceiling, the walls, the floor, so they were both irregularly illuminated. He was silent. He did not ask, “How do you know about the other house?,” or say, “How dare you spy on me?”—things that had been said often enough in the past, until he had learned that she could do this: know, without being told.
She was thinking fast, listening to what she had said. So, Bert and Jasper had been next door, had they? There are comrades there? Yes, that’s it!
She said, “Did you just go there, on the off-chance, or—what happened?”
He replied stiffly, after a pause, “We were contacted. They sent a message.”
“To you? To you and Bert?”
From his hesitation she knew that she had been included, but she did not intend to make an issue of it.
“A message came,” he said, and lay down.
“And you and Bert and—the comrades there decided we should have more people in, as a cover.”
Silence. But she knew he was not asleep. She let a few minutes go by, while she thought. Then she changed the subject, saying, “Quite soon people are going to have to start making a contribution. So far I’ve paid for everything.”
“Where did you get that money?” he asked at once, reminded about it, as she had intended.
She had it ready for him; she leaned over in the dark and handed him some notes.
“How much?” he demanded.
“Fifty.”
“How much did you get?”
“Ask no questions,” she said, though she would have told him had he asked; but he only said, “That’s right, squeeze the last blood out of them.”
She said, “Tomorrow I’ve got to tackle the Council. Will you get my Social Security?”
“Right.”
They were both waiting for the sounds of lovemaking from next door, but Bert and Pat must have dropped off. Jasper and Alice had been lying tense; now they relaxed and lay companionably silent, and Alice was thinking: We are together.… This is like a marriage: talking together before going to sleep. I hope he starts telling me what happened today.
She did not want to ask, but she knew that he knew she craved to hear it all. And soon he was kind; he began to talk. She loved him like this. He told her everything, right from the beginning: how the seven of them had been on the train, how they had bought sandwiches and coffee at the station, and had all crowded on the two seats facing each other and shared breakfast. Then how they went by taxi to the printworks. The taxi driver had been on their side: he had said “Good luck” as he drove off.
“That was nice,” said Alice softly, smiling in the dark.
And so they talked, quietly, Jasper telling everything, for he was good at this, building up word pictures of an event, an occasion. He ought to be a journalist, thought Alice, he is so clever.
She could have talked all night, because of course she had slept a long time. But he fell asleep quite soon; and she was content to lie there, in the quiet, arranging her plans for the next day, which, she knew, would not be easy.
When she woke, Jasper was not there. She ran to the top of the house, and looked into the four rooms where she had left all the windows open. The two rooms where the horrible pails had been were already only rooms in which people would soon be living. But she had not come for that. On two of the ceilings were sodden brown patches, and, having located on the landing the trap door to the attic, she stood on a window sill to reach. She could, just, and felt the trap door lift under her fingers. No problem there!