Down she ran to the kitchen, where there were voices. What she saw made her eyes fill with tears. They were sitting round the table: Bert and Pat, these two close together; Jasper; Jim smiling and happy; and Philip, already working on the cooker, bending over behind it, a cup of coffee on its top. Bert had gone to his friend Philip’s girlfriend, Felicity, the Thermos had been filled, he had bought croissants and butter and jam. It was a real meal. She slid into her place at the head of the table, opposite Bert, and said, “If this room had some curtains …” They all laughed.
“Before talking about curtains, you had better get things fixed with the Council,” said Jasper, rather hectoring, but only because he was jealous of Pat, who said, “Oh, I’d back Alice. I’d back her in anything.”
Coffee and croissants appeared before her, and Alice said, “Has anybody noticed the ceilings upstairs?”
“I have,” said Pat.
Philip said, “I can’t do everything at once.” He sounded aggrieved, and Pat said, “Don’t worry. It’s not difficult to fix slates. I did it once in another squat.”
“I’ll do it with you when I’ve finished this,” said Philip.
Pat said to Bert, “If someone could get the slipped-down tiles out of that guttering …?”
“No head for heights,” said Bert comfortably.
“I can do that,” said Alice. Then she said to Jasper, not Bert, “If you could borrow the car from next door, you could go looking in the skips for some furniture? I saw four skips in my father’s street with all sorts of good stuff.” She added fiercely, “Waste. All this
waste.”
She knew her look was about to overcome her, as she said, “This house, all these rooms … people throwing things out everywhere, when there’s nothing wrong with them.” She sat fighting with herself, knowing that Pat was examining her, diagnostic. Pat said to Bert, “There you are, Bert, job for the day. You and Jasper.” As he sat laughing from some old joke about his laziness, she said, irritated, “Oh, for shit’s sake, Alice has done all the work.”
“And found all the money,” said Philip, from the cooker.
“Put like that,” said Bert.
“Put like that,” agreed Jasper, pleased, already restlessly moving about because of wanting to be off with Bert, looting and finding, street-combing.…
Those two went off as Roberta and Faye came in, saw the remains of the croissants, and sat down to consume them.
Alice dragged Philip’s heavy ladder to the front of the house, and went up it. Luckily the house was built squat, heavy on the earth, not tall and frightening. By the time she reached the top, Pat was already on the roof, sitting near the chimney with one arm round it: she had come up through the attic and a skylight. Around the chimney’s base the roof looked eroded, pocked. A great many tiles had slipped and were now propped along the gutter. All that water pouring in, and going where? They had not properly examined the attics yet.
Alice was reaching out for the fallen tiles, and laying them on the roof in front of her. Pat seemed in no hurry to start; she was enjoying sitting there, looking at roofs and upper windows. And at neighbours, of course, watching them, two women at work on a roof. And where were the men? these people could positively be heard thinking—Joan Robbins, the old woman sitting there under her tree, the man staring grumpily out of a top window.
“Catch,” called Alice, ready to throw, but Pat said, “Wait.” She wriggled onto her stomach and squinted in through the roof.
“There’s a nest on the rafter here,” she said in a hushed voice, as though afraid of disturbing the birds.
“Oh
no
,” said Alice, “oh, how awful!” She sounded suddenly hysterical, and Pat glanced at her, coldly, over her arm, which was stretched in under the roof. “Oh, for God’s
sake,”
said Alice, and began to cry.
“A
bird,”
said Pat. “A
bird
, not a
person.”
She pulled out handfuls of straw and stuff, and flung them out into the air, where they floated down. Then something crashed onto the tiles of the roof: an egg. The tiny embryo of a bird sprawled there. Moving.
Alice went on crying, little gusts of breathless sobs, her eyes fixed on the roof in front of her.
Another egg crashed on the roof.
Childlike frantic eyes implored Pat, who still was rooting about with her arm through the hole beneath her. But Pat was deliberately not looking at Alice snuffling and gulping below her.
A third egg flew in an arc and crashed splodgily in the garden.
“Now that’s done,” said Pat, and she looked at Alice.
“Stop it!”
Alice sniffed herself to silence and, at a nod from Pat, began to throw up the tiles. Pat caught them, carefully, one after another.
Roberta and Faye appeared below, and went off, waving to them.
“Have a good day,” said Pat, brief, ironical, but with a smile saying that she, like Alice, did not expect anything else.
Soon Philip came up to join Pat, and Alice, having cleared all the gutters as far as she could reach, went down to move the heavy ladder along a few paces. She worked, in this way, all round the house, removing wads of sodden leaves, and fallen tiles. Above her, Philip and Pat replaced the tiles.
Alice felt low and betrayed. By somebody. The two minute half-born birds were lying there, their necks stretched out, filmy eyes closed, and no one looked at them. The parent birds fluttered about on the high branches nearby, complaining.
Alice tried to keep her mind on what had to be done next. The cleaning. The
cleaning!
Windows and floors and walls and ceilings, and then paint, so much paint, it would cost.…
In mid-afternoon she went off to ring the Council, as if this were not an important thing, as if things were settled.
She heard that Mary Williams was not there and her heart went dark.
Bob Hood, an official disturbed in his important work, said curtly that the matter of 43 and 45 had been put off till tomorrow.
Said Alice, “It’s all right, then, is it?”
“No, it certainly is not,” said Bob Hood. “It has not been agreed that you or anyone else can occupy those premises.”
Alice said in a voice as peremptory, as dismissive as his, “You ought to come and see this place. It is a disgrace that it could ever be considered as suitable for demolition. Somebody’s head should roll for it. I am sure heads will roll. These are two perfectly sound houses, in good condition.”
A pause. Huffily he said—but he was retreating—“And there have been more complaints. Things cannot be allowed to continue.”
“But we have cleaned up forty-three—the one we took over. The police would confirm that it has been cleaned up.”
Alice waited, confident. Oh, she knew this type, knew how their cowardly little minds worked, knew she had him. She could hear him breathing, could positively note how mental machineries clicked into place.
“Very well,” he said. “I will come round. I’ve been meaning to take a look at those two properties.”
“Can you give me some indication as to time?” said Alice.
“There’s no need for that, we have keys.”
“Yes, but we can’t have people just wandering around, can we? I’d like you to give us some approximate time.”
This was such cheek that she wondered at herself. Yet she knew it was not over the top, because of her manner: every bit as authoritative as his. She was not surprised when he said, “I’ll come round now.”
“Right,” said Alice. “We’ll expect you.” And put down the receiver on him.
She raced back. She called up to Philip and Pat that the Council was coming, and on no account should they stop, because it would be a good thing for them to be seen at work up there. She ran indoors to check on sitting room, kitchen. She went upstairs to the rooms where they slept, and marvelled that Roberta and Faye’s room was a veritable bower of femininity, with dressing table, cushions, duvet on the double sleeping bag, photographs—all of it grubby, but it would make a good impression. She whisked on a skirt. Her hair, her nails. She heard a knock before she expected it and tripped down the stairs with a cool smile already adjusted on her face to open the door correctly on, “Bob Hood? I am Alice Mellings.”
“I hope those two on the roof know what they are doing?”
“I expect so. He is a builder. She is assisting him. As an amateur, but she has done it before.”
She had silenced him. Oh, you nasty little man, she was thinking behind her good-girl’s smile. You nasty little bureaucrat.
“Shall I show you downstairs first? Of course, this will give you no idea of what it was like only three days ago. For one thing, the Council workmen had filled in the lavatory bowls with concrete and ripped the electric cables out—they left them anyhow, a fire hazard.”
He said, “I have no doubt they were fulfilling their instructions.”
“You mean, they were instructed to leave the cables dangerous, and to concrete over the main water tap? I wonder if the Water Board knows about that?”
He was red, and furious. Not looking at him, she flung open one door after another downstairs, lingering over the kitchen. “The electrician had made it safe in here, but you were lucky the place didn’t go up in flames. Mary Williams said you had been over this house. How was it you didn’t notice the cables?”
Upstairs, she said, knowing that to this man anything incorrect, even so much as a mattress on a floor rather than on a bed, must forever be an affront, “Of course, you will have to take my word for it—the state of these rooms was unspeakably awful when we came, but we have only just started.”
“Unspeakably awful now,” he said huffily, looking in at the room she and Jasper slept in, the two sleeping bags like the shed skins of snakes loose against the wall.
“It’s relative. I think you will be surprised when you see it in a month’s time.”
He said, quick to take his advantage, “I told you, don’t expect anything.”
“If this house is left empty again, it will be filled to the brim with vandals and derelicts inside a week, you know that. You’re lucky to have us. It’s being put back into order, with no expense to the taxpayer.”
He did not reply to that. In silence they went through the rooms on the top floor, now sweet-smelling, the air blowing through them. He instinctively closed the windows one after another, performing the task with a fussy, virtuous, irritated little air. Like a fucking housewife, thought the smiling Alice.
They went downstairs. “Well,” he said, “I have to agree with you—there’s no reason why these houses should come down, that I can see. I’ll have to look into it.”
“Unless,” said Alice, sweet and cold, “someone was going to make a profit out of it. Did you see the article in the
Guardian?
‘The Scandal of Council Housing’?”
“As it happens, I did. But it is not relevant to this case.”
“I see.”
They were at the door.
She was waiting. She deserved a capitulation; and it came. The official said, unsmiling but with his whole body expressing unwilling complicity, “I’ll put the case for you tomorrow. But I am not promising. And it is not just this house, it’s the one next door. I’m going there now.”
Again Alice had forgotten next door.
Bob Hood gone, she ran up to a little window that overlooked next door, and watched, in a rage of frustration, how the well-brushed, well-dressed, clean young man stood looking at the piles of rubbish in that garden, saw that the expression on his face was like that on the dustmen’s faces: an exasperated, incredulous disgust.
Unable to bear the beating of her heart, her churning stomach, she went down, slowly, suddenly out of energy, and collapsed in the sitting room as Pat came in, with Philip.
“Well?” demanded Pat; and Philip’s face was stunned with need, with longing, his eyes a prayer.
“It’s dicey,” said Alice, and began to weep, to her own fury.
“Oh, God,” she wept. “Oh, Christ. Oh, shit. Oh no.”
Pat, close on the arm of the chair she was huddled in, put her arm around the dejected shoulders and said, “You’re tired. Surprise! You are tired.”
“It’ll be all right,” sobbed Alice. “I know it will be, it will, I feel it.”
From the silence, she knew that above her head Philip and Pat shared glances that said she, Alice, had to be humoured, patted, caressed, given coffee from the flask, then brandy from a reserve bottle. But she knew that though Pat’s interest was real, it was not like Philip’s and like her own. Pat’s heart would never pound, or her stomach churn.… For this reason, she did not accept Pat’s encircling sisterliness, remained herself, alone, sad and isolated, drinking her coffee, her brandy. Philip was her charge, her responsibility: her
family
, so she felt, because he was as she was. She was pleased, though, to have Pat as an ally.
And at this point, Jasper and Bert arrived, with gleanings from London, that great lucky dip, and Alice flew into the hall, to welcome a load of stuff that had to be sorted out; and which switched her emotions back to another circuit. “Oh, the wicked waste of it all,” she raged, seeing plastic bags full of curtains, which were there because someone had tired of them; a refrigerator, stools, tables, chairs—all of them serviceable, if some needed a few minutes’ work to put right.
Bert and Jasper went out again; they were elated and enjoying it. A pair, a real pair, a team; united by this enterprise of theirs, furnishing this house. And they had the car for the whole day, and must make the most of it.
Philip and Pat let the roof go while they helped Alice allot furniture, flew out to buy curtain fittings for which Alice took the money from her hoard.
They ran around, and up and down, dragging furniture, hanging curtains, spreading on the hall floor a large carpet that needed only some cleaning to make it perfect.
Bert and Jasper came in the late afternoon, having scavenged around Mayfair and St. John’s Wood, with another load, and said that was it, no more for today—and the householders sat in the kitchen drinking tea and eating bacon and eggs properly cooked on the stove, with the purr of the refrigerator for company.
And in the middle of this feast, which was such a delicate balancing of interests, the result of careful and calculated good will, there was a knock. It was, however, tentative, not a peremptory summons. They turned as one; from the kitchen they could see the front door, and it was opening. A young woman stood there, and as the others stared—
Whose friend is she?
—Alice’s heart began to pound. She already knew it all, from the way this visitor was looking around the hall, which was carpeted, warm, properly if dimly lit, then up the solid stairs, and then in at them all. She was all hungry determination and purpose.