“As it happens, yes,” said Reggie. “It’s a new firm, in Guildford. Of course, it’ll be a risk, the failure rate with new firms at the moment being what it is. But it’s an interesting venture; it may succeed.”
The fact that he didn’t say what it was meant, Alice thought, that the “venture” was something they, the others, would criticise. Chemicals; Reggie was a chemist. Well, she couldn’t be bothered to be interested.
Reggie got up. Mary got up. Smiles all around. But relief was what they felt. Body language. Written all over them. They had felt, Mary and Reggie, that they should sit for a while with the others, because of Philip’s death, and now that was enough, they could go back upstairs and get on with their own, sensible lives.
They
wouldn’t lose hold of life and slip down and away, to be washed into some gutter.
Funny, thought Alice. Sitting around this table, let’s say three weeks ago, all of us. You’d not have said that Philip was due to lose hold. Jim? Yes. And Faye …? Alice was careful not to look at Faye, feeling that a look at this moment would be like a doom or a sentence. To her, Alice, the room seemed full of ghosts, and her heart ached for poor little Philip, who had tried so hard, been so gallant.
It wasn’t fair
.
Well, with Reggie and Mary off soon, there wouldn’t be many left here. Jasper and Bert and herself. Caroline and Jocelin. Faye and Roberta. Seven.
Pat, gone. Jim, gone. Philip, gone. Comrade Andrew—disappeared somewhere. Even the goose-girl seemed to Alice, in this mood, like some good old friend, taken from her. Very well, let them take this house away. Why not? She wasn’t going to care. She knew she had her look: she could feel Jasper’s eyes on her. To avoid them, she got up and began preparations for another cauldron of soup.
“Comrade Alice,” said Bert in his political voice, “we are all here. We had decided to have a meeting when Reggie and Mary crashed in.”
“Oh, were you going to bother to call me?” asked Alice. But she came back to her seat, noting that Bert and Jasper had put themselves at the head and the foot of the table.
Mid-afternoon. Sunshine. Joan Robbins was cutting her hedge with old-fashioned shears. Clack, clack, clack, with irregular intervals that kept the ears straining. In the jug on the stool were some early roses. Yellow. The cat lay on the window sill outside the glass, looking in.
Bert began, “In view of our observations in Moscow and subsequent discussions, Jasper and I agree that we should formulate a new policy. Of course it will have to be discussed fully in its implications, but, just to indicate where our conclusions are pointing, we have a tentative formulation. That the comrades present see no reason to accept directives from Moscow.”
“Or from any other extraneous source,” added Jasper.
Bert leaned forward, and looked at them all challengingly.
“Right on,” said Caroline. She was peeling an orange and licking the juice off her fingers. “I agree, absolutely.”
“Me, too,” said Jocelin at once.
“Well, yes,” said Roberta, “but it certainly wasn’t our idea, was it? I mean, Faye’s and mine?”
“Bloody well right,” said Faye. “Whose idea was it to get us all involved with shitty Comrade Andrew and his works? It was yours, Comrade Bert, and yours, Comrade Jasper.” She was using her proper BBC voice, and this, as always, came as a shock after her usual coquettings with the language. She sounded cold and full of hate.
Bert and Jasper were disconcerted. The fury of their disappointment in Moscow had been soothed away by discussions on policy, on “formulations,” and they had lost sight of recent history in theorising. Alice could see that they were really having to make an effort to remember.
Bert was not prepared to relinquish the pleasures of the “implications,” and he said, “But it is essential to analyse the situation. Advisable, at any rate,” he amended, lamely.
“Why?” said Jocelin. And “Why?” asked Faye.
A silence.
Alice said diplomatically, “There are certain things I’d like to know before we drop the subject.”
Faye sighed. Exaggeratedly. She was making an effort to sit here with them at all. She was very pale. There seemed to be life only in her bright hair, which made its pretty ringlets and curls around her emptied face.
“I’d like to know how next door, how number forty-five, got involved with the bloody Russians,” said Faye.
“Good question,” said Caroline, making little piles of orange peel with her solid white fingers, which had rings gleaming on them.
“Does anybody know?” Alice persisted.
“Jocelin knows,” said Caroline.
Jocelin shrugged, as if irritated by the whole thing.
They all looked at Jocelin. She was not easy to look at. This was not because of her appearance, which was unremarkable. She was a blonde, whose ordinariness was pointed by pretty Faye, so delicate and fine, always presenting herself this way and that. Jocelin did not care whether she was admired, or even seen. Cold green eyes observed everything, and she was angry all the time, as if a generalised anger had taken her over at some point and she had come to believe that this was how one experienced the world. Not easy to withstand that hostility; and people tended to look not at her face, but at her hands, which were fine, with long clever fingers, or at her clothes, hoping to find something of interest there. But she wore, always, jeans and a jersey.
“This is what happened,” said Jocelin. “As far as I know. There was a house over in Neasden, which worked very well as an exchange point, for some weeks. No one expects to use a place for longer than weeks. But suddenly the police were on to it. There was an informer. Or something.”
She lit a cigarette, and Alice could see this was to give her time to work out exactly how much she wanted to say.
Alice prompted, “Exchange what, exactly?”
“What was going through next door—at forty-five. Propaganda material mostly. But also
matériel.”
This businesslike word caused, as Alice could see, agreeable
frissons
in Bert and Jasper, who both, not knowing they did, leaned forward intently to stare at Jocelin. And then, realising what they were doing, looked away, uncomfortable.
“It was a question of finding somewhere, quickly. Very quickly. Someone said that forty-five was empty. All that was needed was a place for two days. So it was thought.”
“Who
needed it?” said Bert, clumsily.
“Obviously, Comrade Andrew,” said Caroline, crisp and disapproving.
“Yes,” said Jocelin. “He had been organising propaganda material. Mostly for the IRA. Printed in Holland, mostly. And … other things. Some of it tricky stuff. Very.” Here she smiled coldly at them, but with closed lips, and they all smiled uneasily and averted their eyes.
“But the house wasn’t empty,” said Caroline. “I was only away for a few days. I came back and found two rooms stacked with stuff. And then Comrade Muriel appeared, then Comrade Andrew.” Caroline laughed, genuinely, and, relieved, they all laughed. Not, however, Jocelin, who turned her green eyes on them, one after another, waiting to go on.
“It seems it was not easy to find another suitable house,” said Jocelin. “Nothing really safe. Meanwhile, they went on with forty-five. They had all kinds of makeshifts. Once there were four dustbins full of pamphlets covered with rubbish in the garden. They had plastic rubbish sacks with
matériel
more than once. But it couldn’t go on like that. Next, most of the comrades left all at once from this house, and Comrade Alice moved in.” She smiled, but her eyes were like lumps of green stone. “Comrade Alice’s combination of remarkable talents were a godsend. It seems that Comrade Muriel and Comrade Andrew were about to follow your example into getting forty-five an agreed tenancy with the Council. But they had second thoughts: that it would risk all kinds of visits from the Council, and the stuff kept arriving, any odd time of the day or night, and being taken off again, too. No, they decided that it was enough that such perfect respectability existed next door. And there was a Council official, too. Mary Williams moved in. And then there was even a CCU Congress.” She laughed, making it clear what she thought of the CCU. And of them?
“But how did you get involved in all this,” demanded Faye. “You didn’t like Comrade Andrew any more than we did.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like him,” said Jocelin. “Lifee—who cares about all that? I was not involved with Comrade Andrew, or any of his doings. I decided to move in here because I was told by Muriel that you wanted to work with the IRA.”
And now she looked at them again, slowly, one after another, taking her time about it. She said softly, “That is my interest. But about Moscow, the KGB and all that, I’m not interested—but that’s all history, isn’t it, now that Andrew has gone. Wherever he has gone. And I wouldn’t like to be in his shoes.”
“No,” said Caroline. “No.”
Alice felt hurt for Comrade Andrew. It seemed something was softly whimpering away in there, in her chest. That was the end of Comrade Andrew, then? They didn’t care what happened to him! Or if they never saw him again!
Jasper was saying, “Why? What? I don’t know what you mean?”
And Bert, “What did he do?”
Nobody answered.
They couldn’t be bothered
. Comrade Andrew was not worth the effort. Gone. Disappeared.
Jasper said hotly—it came bursting out—“Bert and I went to Ireland. We saw the comrades. They weren’t all that interested.”
“So I heard,” said Jocelin calmly. “Yes, I heard about that. But what of it? Who are the IRA to tell us what to do in our own country?”
This struck them all with the force of some obvious and ineluctable truth that inexplicably had not been seen by them till this moment. Of course! Who
were
the IRA, to tell them what to do?
Bert laughed softly, and his white teeth showed. Jasper laughed—and Alice suffered on hearing it, for she could measure by it how hurt he had been, how put down, by the refusal in Moscow to take him seriously, after the refusal in Ireland. Jasper’s laugh was scornful and proud, and confidence was rushing back into him, and he looked about at them all, justified.
“Right on,” said Faye. “At last. As far as I am concerned, you’ve all just seen the light.
We
have to decide what to do, and
we
will carry it out. We don’t have to ask permission of foreigners.” She was still using her cold, correct voice.
“Absolutely,” said Roberta.
“Then that’s that,” said Alice. “All we have to do now is to make a plan.”
At this point, a knock on the front door. Alice went, and came back in with Felicity. It was a question, since Alice was Philip’s “next of kin,” of her going to the hospital for the formalities. Felicity did not want to sit down; did not want, as they all saw, to be forced into taking on Philip’s affairs.
Alice said angrily, “Why me, Felicity? Why not you?”
“Look,” said Felicity. “Philip came to stay in my place because he was stuck. Desperate. As far as I was concerned, he was just someone without a place to live.”
“But he must have a family, or someone?”
“He has a sister, somewhere.”
“But where?”
“How do I know? He never said.”
The two women faced each other, as if in a bitter quarrel. Seeing how they must look, they became apologetic.
Felicity said, “When I said Philip could stay, I thought it was for the weekend, a week. He was with me for over a year.”
Alice saw that it was she who was going to have to do it, and she said, bitterly, “Oh, very well.” Now she had got her way, Felicity became “nice,” and refused a cup of tea with many hurried apologies, and fussed her way out of the house.
“Poor Alice,” said Roberta. “I’ll come with you.” Alice began to cry. They all looked at her in amazement.
“Of course she is crying,” said Roberta. “Of course she is. She is
tired.”
She put her arm around Alice and took her to the door. “Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do when we’ve gone,” she said facetiously to them all, but her eyes were on Faye, who, betrayed, tossed her head and would not look at Roberta; she had suddenly again become a cockney maiden.
The two women were at the hospital for some hours, signing forms, seeing appropriate officials. Alice agreed to get a death certificate. She arranged to go through Philip’s possessions with a Council representative, who would come tomorrow.
At midnight, Roberta tucked her up with a cup of hot chocolate, making it clear that that was it: she did not feel obliged to do more for Philip, though she would if Faye were not so needful.
Alice spent the morning over the death certificate and the afternoon going through Philip’s possessions, with the official. It was an awful, painful business. Philip owned a few clothes, and about five hundred pounds in the post office, which would go to pay for his funeral.
As for his ladders and equipment, Alice said nothing about them, so they, at least, would not be sold to some dealer for a tenth of their value. They—in number 43—now at least owned their own ladders, trestles, and tools. For what that was worth; for as long as that was worth anything.
Because of Alice’s preoccupation with the disposition of Philip, the household marked time. Rather, all did save Jocelin, who was at work in an upstairs room on a variety of devices that she was concocting out of the books she referred to as “recipe books,” which gave admirable and concise advice about making explosive devices. She had purloined some of the
matériel
on its way through number 45. Alice, with the others, saw these devices, on Jocelin’s invitation. They were ranged on one of Philip’s trestles in a locked room—locked because of Mary and Reggie, who, though moving out in a few days, were not yet gone. What struck Alice about the things Jocelin had made was that they looked so unimportant and even flimsy, were mere assemblages of bits of this and that. Electronic devices that Jocelin was clearly proud of seemed no more portentous than those fragments of minuscule circuitry that appear when the insides of a transistor radio are broken apart.
There were also paper clips, drawing pins, a couple of cheap watches, bits of wire, household chemicals, copper tubing of various sizes, ball bearings, tin tacks, packets of plastic explosive, old-fashioned dynamite, reels of thick cotton, string.
While Jocelin worked with relish (“enjoyment” was not a word for Jocelin) at these little toys, and Alice wept over Philip—for she felt now as if she had lost an old friend, even a brother—Jasper and Bert went to some demonstrations, admonished by the others on no account to get themselves arrested, for there was important work to be done; and Roberta took Faye to stay with a friend at Brighton, because the sea air would do Faye some good. Roberta’s mother was still in a coma.
A day passed slowly. The house seemed empty. Alice found herself thinking that Roberta and Faye probably would be back that night. Would they like to be welcomed by a real meal, even a feast? While she worried about this, sitting in the kitchen with the cat, Caroline came in with carrier bags full of food. She was smooth and sleek with pleasure; she said she felt like cooking a real meal; no, Alice must sit where she was and for once allow herself to be waited on.
Until then only Alice had brought in food. Real food, that is, not a pizza or some portions of chips. Only Alice had trudged in with loads of fruit, of vegetables, had stacked the refrigerator with butter and milk, piled a cupboard with pastas and pulses. Now she sat gratefully watching Caroline, who worked smiling, full of a rich secret contentment that seemed to spill out over her, like candlelight. Alice felt meagre, dry; she did these things, cooked and fed and nurtured, but it was out of having to, a duty. She had never in her life felt what she saw brimming over in Caroline, who, as she licked a spoon to test a sauce, looked at Alice over it as though she were sharing some pleasure with her that only the rare, the initiated, of the world could even suspect. And then she lifted a spoon over to Alice, carefully, guarding—it seemed—some essence or distillation, and watched, her eyes glistening, as Alice tasted and said, “Yes, fantastic, wonderful.”
“I am a great
cook,”
sang or purred Caroline. “This is what I ought to be doing.…” And, because she was reminded of what she was doing, how employed, a bleakness came over her for a moment, and she was silent.
She told Alice her history. A good daughter of the middle classes, as she described herself, she saw the light—that is, that the System was rotten and needed a radical overthrow—when she was eighteen. She was in love with a young Che Guevara from the LSE, but he turned respectable on her and settled for the Labour Party. Nevertheless, he was the love of her life. When she visited him—“Absolute anguish, my dear, why do I do it?”—she knew that this was the man for her. “But how could I live like that? I couldn’t! One weekend is enough. Then we weep, we quarrel, and we part. Until next time.” So she chattered, becoming flushed, seeming to loosen and soften from the heat in the kitchen, flour on her cheek, sleeves rolled up, her large white hands in control of everything. She looked plump, soft, content, full of secret and unscrupulous satisfactions.
Jasper and Bert came back, ready for hot baths and food. They had gone down to Nottingham to join the pickets in a miners’ strike. It had rained and was cold. Roberta and Faye were starving, they said when they returned. Faye had colour in her cheeks again; she had rejoined the living, and was amusingly and enliveningly her cockney self. Roberta, so happy that her love was better, showed a side of herself they had not seen. She sang, very well, in a full, controlled contralto, first some workers’ songs, then a whole range of songs from the Portuguese, from Spanish, from Russian. It turned out that she had been trained to sing, but she had found her niche with the revolution.
There was enough wine, and everyone got tight. Mary and Reggie did not appear.
They were all going up to bed, at about two in the morning, when there was a low, hurried knock at the front door.
“My God, the police,” shrieked Alice and rushed to confront them. But it was not the police. Two young men shouldering large packages stood there, smiling, bent sideways from the weight.
“What’s that? You can’t bring those here,” said Alice, knowing what was happening, all her pleasure in the evening gone, feeling chilled and apprehensive.
“Come on, now,” said one, Irish as they make them. “We were told to leave these here.”
“It’s a mistake,” said Alice.
But he had slid the package onto the hall floor and gone off, while his fellow, grinning bashfully, let his load slide off.
“You have to take them back,” said Alice. “Do you understand?” They had both gone down the path, and she could see them standing by a small shabby van. They were conferring, turning to check the house number with a piece of paper. Alice arrived beside them and said, “You haven’t understood. This stuff shouldn’t be left here! You must take it away again.”
“Ah, well now, but that’s easily said,” said the one who had spoken before. He sounded injured. More, afraid. He even glanced around into the shadowy gardens, and then out into the main road, where the traffic was thinner but still moving. It was a dark night, damp. The three stood close together under the street light and argued.
Alice said that this was the wrong house, and the house they wanted, number 45, was no longer safe to leave anything at.
They said that they had been told number 43.
“You have got to take them away.”
“And we will not!”
She imagined that she heard a window going up behind her and turned to stare up into the darkened top of the house opposite Joan Robbins, and while she did this the two men took the opportunity to nip into the van. She had to stand aside quickly to avoid being run over.
“Oh no,” she wailed into the dark, watching the little van dart off to the corner and turn out of sight. “No, it simply isn’t
on
. It’s not
fair.”
She stood there, helpless, feeling that things had gone out of control. Then thought that she should go in, in case any nosy neighbour was awake and interested. Slowly she went indoors. The two cartons, as smooth and bland as two brown pebbles, stood there in the hall with nothing on them to announce their contents.
On the stairs stood Jasper and Bert, staring, disconsolate. Also, rather drunk. Above them, Jocelin. Roberta and Faye had gone off into their room. Caroline was still clearing up in the kitchen.
“We can’t have these here,” appealed Alice, to the men, but it was Jocelin who leaped down past them, and said only, “Up into the attic.” As the two women laboured up past the men on the stairs, they came to and helped. First one very heavy carton and then the other were stowed in a far corner of the attic.
Jocelin said she would find out what was there in the morning. Perhaps even tonight: she didn’t feel sleepy.
“Don’t blow us all up,” said Jasper, and she did not reply. She did not think much of Jasper, and showed it. She seemed to like Bert, however. Bert, for his part, was attracted by Caroline, who either had not noticed this or had decided to ignore it.