“Listen, Alice, now you listen, you listen carefully, for I am about to say my piece.…” And Alice could see it was hard for her to assert herself, that this was why she had so many little tricks and turns, little poutings and hesitations and small wary glances and little smiles at Roberta and at herself, but underneath she was iron, she was formidable. “Once and for all, I do not care about all this domestic bliss, all the house and garden stuff.…” Here she waited, politely, while first Roberta and then Alice—seeing that Roberta did—laughed. “Well, for me it is all pretty classy stuff,” said Faye. “This house would have seemed a palace to me once. I’ve lived in at least a thousand squats, dens, holes, corners, rooms, hovels, and residences, and this is the best yet. And I don’t care.” Here she pettishly, humorously, wagged a finger at Alice. Roberta had her eyes on her love’s face, exactly like an elder sister:
Is she going to go too far?
Too far, Alice knew, with all this presentation, the manner, the means that enabled Faye to say her piece. Roberta did not want Alice to think that this girl was frivolous or silly.
Well, she certainly did not.
“Any minute now we are going to have hot running water and double glazing, I wouldn’t be surprised. For me this is all a lot of shit, do you hear?
Shit!”
Alice got up, poured boiling water into the three mugs that already had coffee powder in them, set the mugs on the table, put the milk bottle and the sugar near Faye. She did this as something of a demonstration and saw that as Faye stretched out her hand for the coffee, which she was going to drink black and bitter, she knew it, and even appreciated it, judging from her quick shrewd little smile. But she was going on, with determination. She had also lost her cockney self, and the voice that went with it.
It was in all-purpose BBC English that she went on, “I don’t care about that, Alice. Don’t you see? If you want to wait on me, then do. If you don’t, don’t. I don’t care, either way.”
Roberta said quickly, protectively, “Faye has had such a terrible life, such an awful shitty terrible life.…” And her voice broke and she turned her face away.
“Yes, I did,” said Faye, “but don’t make a thing of it. I don’t.” Roberta shook her head, unable to speak, and put her hand, tentatively, ready to be rejected, on Faye’s arm. Faye said, “If you are going to tell Alice about my ghastly childhood, then tell her, but not when I am here.”
She drank gulps of the bitter coffee, grimaced, reached for a biscuit, took a neat sharp bite out of it, and crunched it up, as if it were a dose of medicine. Another gulp of caffeine. Roberta had her face averted. Alice knew that she was infinitely sorrowful about something; if not Faye’s past, then Faye’s present: her hand, ignored by Faye, had dropped off Faye’s arm and crept back into her own lap, where it lay trembling and pitiful, and her lowered head with its crop of black silvered curls made Alice think of a humbly loving dog’s. Roberta was radiating love and longing. At this moment, at least, Faye did not need Roberta, but Roberta was dying of need for Faye.
Faye probably has times when she wants to be free of Roberta, finds it all too much—yes, that’s it. Well, I bet Roberta never wants to be free of Faye! Oh, God, all this personal stuff, getting in the way of everything all the time. Well, at least Jasper and I have got it all sorted out.
Faye was going on. Christ, listen to her, she could get a job with the BBC, thought Alice. I wonder when she learned to do it so well. And what for?
“I’ve met people like you before, Alice. In the course of my long career. You cannot let things be. You’re always keeping things up and making things work. If there’s a bit of dust in a corner you panic.” Here Roberta let out a gruff laugh, and Alice primly smiled—she was thinking of all those pails. “Oh, laugh. Laugh away.” It seemed she could have ended there, for she hesitated, and the pretty cockney almost reclaimed her, with a pert flirtatious smile. But Faye shook her off, and sat upright in a cold fierce solitude, self-sufficient, so that Roberta’s again solicitous and seeking hand fell away. “I care about just one thing, Alice. And you listen to me, Roberta, you keep forgetting about me, what I am, what I really am
like
. I want to put an end to this shitty fucking filthy lying cruel hypocritical system. Do you understand? Well, do you, Roberta?”
She was not at all pretty, or appealing, then, but pale and angry, and her mouth was tight and her eyes hard, and this—how she looked—took sentimentality away from what she said next. “I want to put an end to it all so that children don’t have a bad time, the way I did.”
Roberta sat there isolated, repudiated, unable to speak.
Alice said, “But, Faye, do you think I’m not a revolutionary? I agree with every word you say.”
“I don’t know anything about you, Comrade Alice. Except that you are a wonder with the housekeeping. And with the police. I like that. But just before you came, we took a decision, a joint decision. We decided we were going to work with the IRA. Have you forgotten?”
Alice was silent. She was thinking, But Jasper and Bert have been discussing things next door, surely? She said, carefully, “I understood that a comrade next door had indicated that …”
“What comrade?” demanded Roberta, coming to life again. “We know nothing about that.”
“Oh,” said Alice. “I thought …”
“It’s just amateurish rubbish,” said Faye. “Suddenly some unknown authority next door says this and that.”
“I didn’t realise,” said Alice. She had nothing to say. She was thinking: Was it Bert who led Jasper into …? Was it Jasper who …? I don’t remember Jasper doing anything like this before.…
After some time, while no one said anything, but they all sat separate, thinking their own thoughts, Alice said, “Well, I agree. It is time we all got together and discussed it. Properly.”
“Including the two new
comrades?”
enquired Faye, bitter.
“No, no, just us. Just you and Roberta and Bert and Jasper and Pat and me.”
“Not Philip and
not
Jim,” said Roberta.
“Then the six of us might go to a café or somewhere for a discussion,” said Alice.
“Quite so,” said Faye. “We can’t have a meeting here, too many extraneous elements. Exactly.”
“Well, perhaps we could borrow a room in forty-five,” said Alice.
“We could go and have a lovely picnic in the park, why not?” said Faye, fiercely.
“Why not?” said Roberta, laughing. It could be seen that she was coming back into the ascendant, sat strong and confident, and sent glances towards Faye which would soon be returned.
Another silence, companionable, no hard feelings.
Alice said, “I have to ask this, it has to be raised. Are you two prepared to contribute anything to expenses?”
Faye, as expected, laughed. Roberta said quickly, reprovingly of Faye—which told Alice everything about the arguments that had gone on about this very subject—“We are going to pay for food and suchlike. You tell us how it works out.”
“Very cheaply, with so many of us.”
“Yes,” said Faye. “That’s fair. But you can leave me out of all the gracious living. I’m not interested. Roberta can do what she likes.” And she got up, smiled nicely at them both, and went out. Roberta made an instinctive movement to go after her but stayed put. She said, “I’ll make a contribution, Alice. I’m not like Faye—I’m not indifferent to my surroundings. You know, she really is,” she said urgently, smiling, pressing Alice with Faye’s difference, her uniqueness, her preciousness.
“Yes, I know.”
Roberta gave Alice two ten-pound notes, which she took, with no expression on her face, knowing that that would be it, and thanked Roberta, who fidgeted about, and then, unable to bear it, got up and went after Faye.
It was not yet ten. Mary had said to ring at one. Persuaded by the odours left on the air of the kitchen by Faye, by Roberta, she went up to the bathroom and forced herself into a cold bath, where she crouched, unable actually to lower her buttocks into it, scrubbing and lathering. In a glow she dressed in clean clothes, bundled what she had taken off with Jasper’s clothes that needed a wash—determined by sniffing at them—and was on her way out to the laundrette when she saw the old woman sitting under the tree in the next garden, all sharp jutting limbs, like a heap of sticks inside a jumble of cardigan and skirt. She urgently gesticulated at Alice, who went out into the street and in again at the neat white gate, smiling. She hoped that neighbours were watching.
“She’s gone out and left me,” said the old woman, struggling to sit up from her collapsed position. “They don’t care, none of them care.” When she went on in a hoarse voice about the crimes of Joan Robbins, Alice deftly pulled up the old dear, thinking that she weighed no more than her bundle of laundry, and tidied her into a suitable position for taking the air. Alice listened, smiling, until she had had enough, then she bent down, to shout into possibly deaf ears, “But she’s very nice to bring you out here to sit in the garden; she doesn’t have to do that, does she?” Then, as the ancient face seemed to struggle and erupt into expostulation, she said, “Never mind, I’ll bring you a nice cup of coffee.”
“Tea, tea,” urged the crone.
“You’ll have to have coffee. We’re short of a teapot. Now, you just sit there and wait.”
Alice went back, made sweet coffee, and brought it to the old woman. “What’s your name?”
“Mrs. Jackson, Jackson, that’s what I am called.”
“My name is Alice and I live at forty-three.”
“You sent away all those dirty people, good for you,” said Mrs. Jackson, who was already slipping down in her chair again, like a drunken old doll, the mug sliding sideways in her hand.
“I’ll see you in a few minutes,” said Alice, and ran off.
The laundrette used up three-quarters of an hour. She collected her cup from Mrs. Jackson, and then stood listening to Joan Robbins, who came out of her kitchen to tell Alice that she should not believe the old lady, who was wandering; there was not one reason in the world why she, Joan Robbins, should do a thing for her, let alone help her down the stairs to the garden and up again and make her cups of coffee and … The complaints went on, while Mrs. Jackson gesticulated to both of them that her tale was the right one. This little scene was being witnessed by several people in gardens and from windows, and Alice let them have the full benefit of it.
With a wave she went back into her own house.
It was eleven, and a frail apparition wavered on the stairs: Philip, who said, “Alice, I don’t feel too good, I don’t feel …”
He arrived precariously beside her, and his face, that of a doleful but embarrassed angel, was presented to her for diagnosis and judgement, in perfect confidence of justice. Which she gave him: “I am not surprised, all that work on the roof. Well, forget it today, I’d take it easy.”
“I would have gone with the others, but …”
“Go into the sitting room. Relax. I’ll bring you some coffee.”
She knew this sickness needed only affection, and when Philip was settled in a big chair, she took him coffee and sat with him, thinking: I have nothing better to do.
She had known that at some time she would have to listen to a tale of wrongs: this was the time. Philip had been promised jobs and not given them; had been turned off work without warnings; had not been paid for work he had done; and this was told her in the hot aggrieved voice of one who had suffered inexplicable and indeed malevolent bad luck, whereas the reason for it all—that he was as fragile as a puppet—was not mentioned; could never, Alice was sure, be mentioned. “And do you know, Alice, he said to me, Yes, you be here next Monday and I’ll have a job for you—do you know what that job was? He wanted me to load great cases of paint and stuff into vans! I’m a builder and decorator, Alice! Well, I did it, I did it for four days, and my back went out. I was in hospital for two weeks, and then in physio for a month. When I went to him and said he owed me for the four days, he said I was the one in the wrong and …” Alice listened and smiled, and her heart hurt for him. It seemed to her that a great deal had been asked of her heart that morning, one poor victim after another. Well, never mind, one day life would not be like this; it was capitalism that was so hard and hurtful and did not care about the pain of its victims.
At half past twelve, when she was just thinking that she could go to the telephone booth, she heard someone coming in, and flew to intercept the police, the Council—who this time?
It was Reggie, who, smiling, was depositing cases in the hall. He said that Mary had slipped out from the meeting to telephone him the good news. And she would be over with another load in the lunch hour. The relief of it made Alice dizzy; then she wept. Standing against the wall by the door into the sitting room, she had both hands up to her mouth as if in an extreme of grief, and her tight-shut eyes poured tears.
“Why, Alice,” said Reggie, coming to peer into her tragic face, and she had to repel friendly pats, pushes, and an arm around her shoulders.
“Reaction,” she muttered, diving off to the lavatory to be sick. When she came out, Philip and Reggie stood side by side, staring at her, ready to smile, and hoping she would allow them to.
And, at last, she smiled, then laughed, and could not stop.
Philip looked after her; and Reggie, embarrassed, sat by.
And she was embarrassed: What’s wrong with me? I must be sick too.
But Philip was no longer sick. He went off to measure up the broken windows for new glass, and Reggie climbed the stairs to look over the rooms. Alice stayed in the kitchen.
There Mary came to her with a carton of saucepans, crockery, and an electric kettle. She sat herself down at the other end of the table. She was flushed and elated. Alice had heard her laughing with Reggie in the same way Faye and Roberta laughed; and, sometimes, Bert and Pat. Two against the world. Intimacy.
Alice asked at once, “What are the conditions?”
“It’s only for a year.”
Alice smiled, and, on Mary’s look, explained, “It’s a lifetime.”
“But of course they could extend. If they don’t decide to knock it down after all.”