She felt she might faint, or even begin to weep. She could feel tears filling her, beginning to press and exude everywhere over her body.
He said, “I am by myself. I have a car. I need someone—better, two people—to go out to this place and get the packages.”
“Oh,” she said, breathlessly, her voice sounding weak and silly. “I shouldn’t do that. Not in full daylight. There might be people there. Rubbish vans emptying rubbish, for a start. It would be dangerous.”
“It would be dangerous?” he enquired. Again she felt he might easily kill her, do something he could not stop himself from doing. “We can’t have that lying around on a rubbish dump,” he said.
“Why not? Have you ever seen one? It’s full of all kinds of stuff. Acres of it. A couple of ordinary brown packages wouldn’t be noticed much.” She was beginning to feel better again, she noted.
“Two new, large, unopened packages?” he enquired, his face close to hers, eyes quite dislocated with anger.
“All the same, I’d wait till tonight.”
“I’m not waiting till tonight. Get two people down here. Men. There are men in the house, aren’t there?”
She said, cold, almost herself again, “I and another girl carried the cases”—she was going to say “upstairs,” but caught herself in time—“to the car.”
“Then two women. It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does matter,” she informed him. “Don’t give us orders. Don’t you understand, you can’t give us orders, we aren’t Russians.”
Her eyes were shut, not so much because she did not feel well (in fact, she felt better) as because she could sense his hatred for her enclose her. Well, that was it, she was going to be killed. A movement, the sounds of footsteps; she opened her eyes and saw him going off. But at the door he stopped and turned and said very quietly, with an extraordinary intensity of contempt, of personal dislike, “Don’t imagine that this is the end of it, Comrade Mellings. It is not the end, far from it. You can’t play little games with us like that, you’ll see,
Comrade
Mellings.” And his face convulsed briefly, in that movement of cheeks and tongue which if continued would have ended in the action of spitting. And he stood with eyes narrowed, staring at her, determined to mark her, force her down, with the strength of what he felt.
And now this was the man himself, absolutely what he was. She knew this, knew she saw
him
. This was not the smoothie, the conforming spy who had been taught to control every movement, gesture, look; but something behind that. This was power. Not fantasies about power, little games with it, envy of it, but power itself. He embodied the certitudes of strength, of being utterly and completely in the right. He knew himself to be superior, dominant, in control. Above all, in the right.
He went out, shutting the door—she noted—gently. No loud bangs that might alert neighbours.
She went swiftly to the sink and was sick.
Tidily she swirled away all that nastiness, scrubbing and cleaning, though she had to hold on with one hand, her knees were so weak. She took herself, actually staggering, to the lavatory, for terror, it seemed, sat in her bowels. She came back, holding on to door edges and door handles, to the kitchen, where she collapsed on the table, face down, arms sprawled out, limp as a rag. She had never before felt anything like this physical weakness. She lay there for perhaps half an hour, while strength slowly returned.
Then Jocelin came in, hardly glanced at her—so she couldn’t be so obviously in a ruinous state—and said that she must have strong coffee: not sleeping did not suit her. If she started now, she was sure she could get ready the appropriate explosive device for their work tonight. She spoke in an abstracted way, but with the cold relish that was her way of showing the excitement that, Alice knew, would shortly again be restoring herself. To hasten the healing process, she went up with Jocelin to her workroom, taking a chair with her this time, and watched those careful, intelligent hands at work. And soon she did feel so much better she had almost forgotten Comrade Gordon O’Leary. She thought vaguely: We’ll have to decide about whether to take those packages to the rubbish tip or not. As things are, he’ll believe they have already been found and taken off somewhere. So far behind her now did her real terror seem that she actually thought: Well, that’ll give him a bad moment or two. Serve him right. She told Jocelin about him as if he had been some sort of importunate salesman she had sent packing.
“Who the hell do they think they are?” Jocelin agreed.
Their elation began to fill the whole house, like the aromas of one of Alice’s soups, and for a while they were all up there, watching Jocelin at work, joking about how they would like to use this bomb or that. Tower blocks of flats. Police-computer information storage. Any information storage systems, for that matter. Certain housing estates. Any nuclear shelters that had been built anywhere, for it was only the rich who would benefit from them. Nuclear power stations.
This game got wilder and noisier, until Caroline pointed out that Reggie and Mary would be in soon. Jocelin was left to her work, and the others dispersed about the house, but kept meeting on landings, or in the kitchen, for today it was hard not to be in one another’s company, to share this tide of excitement, of power.
Everything went well that night, which was a Thursday. Reggie and Mary came in long enough to collect a few things; they were off for the weekend. A stroke of luck: it meant they could all spend that evening together. They gathered in the kitchen, laughing, joking, as if they were drunk. But no one drank. And Jocelin was quiet, self-absorbed, set apart from them by the necessities of her task.
She decided that it would be better if there were three in all, not two, because of lifting that heavy cement post. They competed for the honour, and Jocelin chose Bert. Faye was disappointed, and a little bitchy. Roberta said, “Never mind, there’ll be other times.”
At a quarter to four, Jocelin, Bert, and Alice quietly left the house. All the windows in the little street were dark. In the main road the lamps seemed to be withdrawing light back into themselves; their yellow was thickening as a cool abstract grey stole into the sky. Along the pavements between the lamps it was dark. Low down in front of them this darkness agitated itself, and became a small black-and-white dog, trotting with a modest and thoughtful air from somewhere to somewhere. There were no people in this street, and no one in the little street where they had to do their work. The whole business took a minute, with Alice and Bert heaving up the bollard, and Jocelin placing the bomb under it. The bollard stayed upright. They did not run off, but walked slowly to a corner, then walked fast. Some minutes after they reached home, and were in the kitchen drinking chocolate, they heard the thud of the bomb. It was louder than they expected.
They sat around, not joking now, but tense, even irritable, longing to go and see, but Bert said that criminals always tried to visit the scene of the crime and the police counted on that.
Jocelin actually went off to bed. Then so did Faye and Roberta. The others could not. At about nine Caroline strolled down, through busy streets, found the area roped off with red and yellow tapes “like a street fair,” she said, and the police all over the place. There seemed to be quite a bit of damage. Windows blown in, for instance. They woke Jocelin to tell her this. She was upset; she had intended to fragment the bollard and a certain area of the pavement. She, too, went down to look, and came back gloomy. Her calculations had not been correct. She returned to her workroom, saying she wanted to be alone to think.
Alice remembered that this morning was when she had the car to dispose of the bales, or packages. She was bad-tempered, and even bitter: that she should have to deal with this, on such a morning, on a day when surely she should be allowed to be with the others, without problems!
They discussed it. Should they go out now, mid-morning, and find some place to dump the packages? Caroline said lazily that they shouldn’t bother—everyone would be gone from the house quite soon anyway. Let the next lot of squatters deal with the problem.
Bert and Jasper said no. Alice, reluctantly, agreed.
The four got the packages down out of the attic, with difficulty, and much bumping. The noise brought Jocelin out. She said she wanted to see what was in there; after all, it might come in useful. The bands of plastic webbing were easily cut. The wrappings were of thick waxed paper. Under that, a heavy cardboard. Inside, thick wads of coarse oily wool-waste. Within this nest were parts of guns. The five conspirators were bent over the opened package, staring in. Their hearts thudded, and their eyes dazzled. They straightened themselves, slowly, to breathe more easily. Caroline’s hand, which was resting on the package’s edge, was shaking, and she quickly removed it. The five of them stood there upright around the half-buried gun parts, which gleamed dully in the inadequate light. Their breathing rasped and sighed, and they heard one another swallow, and Bert said, laughing, “You’d think we were scared shitless—and I believe I am. Suddenly, it’s all for real.…” They all laughed, except for Alice, who was standing with both hands loosely fisted, covering her half-open mouth. Her eyes stared tragically over her knuckles at Jocelin. Jocelin gave her an impatient look and said, “Come on, let’s get moving,” and started to push back the packaging.
“No!” shouted Jasper, coming to life. In a fury of energy he began removing parts of guns, and assembling them as he thought they should go, working on top of the other parts still half buried in the waste.
“No,” said Jocelin, cold and quiet—much to Alice’s relief; and she chimed in with, “No, Jasper, don’t.”
Bert was already trying to help Jasper, but he was slow and clumsy compared with him.
Although Jasper was so neatly and competently sliding the parts together, taking them apart, trying other ways to fit them, he was not achieving anything like a complete weapon.
“Are they machine guns?” asked Alice, almost weeping.
“Stop it,” said Jocelin directly to Jasper. “If you did manage to assemble one, what would you do with it?”
“Oh, we’ll find a use for it, all right,” said Bert, all his white teeth gleaming, trying hard to be as skilful as Jasper, who had nearly got together a black, shining, sinister-looking thing that was like the weapons you see in children’s space films.
“Now you’ve got fingerprints all over it,” said Jocelin, with such contempt that first Bert and then Jasper let go the guns and fell back. “Stupid fool,” said Jocelin, her cold eyes demolishing Jasper, showing exactly what she really did think of him. “You
fool
. What do you think you are going to do? Have them just lying around, I suppose, in case one of them came in handy for some little job or other?” She pushed the two men back with her elbows, and began work herself. First she swiftly and cleverly pulled apart the half-assembled weapons (showing them all that she knew exactly what she was doing, she was familiar with them) and then took up handfuls of the waste, with which she cleaned off the fingerprints, holding the parts carefully with fingers gloved in waste.
Caroline remarked, “Probably just rubbing the marks off like that won’t be much good—not with the methods they use these days.”
“Probably not,” said Jocelin, “but it’s too late to think of that now, isn’t it? We’ve got to get rid of these things—just get rid of them.”
“Why don’t we bury them in the garden?” suggested Bert, sounding like a deprived small boy, and she said, “In
this
garden, I suppose you mean, what a brilliant idea!” And then, as she snuggled back the gun parts into their nest, she said, “If you have in mind any little jobs that actually have to be done, something
concrete—
that is, within a proper context, properly organised—then weapons are available. Surely you know that?”
Bert was looking at her with resentment, but also with admiration that relinquished to her the right to take command. His eyes burned with excitement, and he could not stop smiling: teeth, eyes, his red lips, flashed and shone.
Jasper was containing himself, eyes shielded by his lids, so as not to show how furious he was—which Alice knew him to be. She was seeing Jasper, Bert as she had not done before—soldiers, real soldiers, in a war. She was thinking, Why, they’d love it, particularly Jasper. He’d enjoy every minute of it.… This thought made her even more dismayed, and she took a few steps back from the scene, the knuckles of both hands again at her mouth.
Jocelin was taking in her condition very well, despite her preoccupation with closing up the package. “Alice, have you never seen guns before?”
“No.”
“You are overreacting.”
“Yes, she is,” said Jasper at once, coming to life in open fury at Alice. “Look at her, you’d think she’d seen a ghost.” And here he became, suddenly, like a child in a playground trying to scare another. “Woooo-o-o,” he wailed, flapping his hands at her, “Alice has seen a ghost.…”
“Oh, for Christ’s
sake,”
shouted Jocelin, losing her temper. “We’ve got a serious job to do—remember? And I’m going back up to work. Take those cases out somewhere and dump them and forget about them. They’re nothing but trouble.” With which she went upstairs, in her slow, determined way, not looking back at them. She was—they knew—furious with herself for losing control.
They all watched her, silent, till she was out of sight, and the atmosphere eased.
“Come on, let’s get going,” said Bert.
Indecision. With Jocelin, the real boss of the scene, absent, for a moment no one could act. Then Alice came to life, saying, “I’ll go and get the car.” She ran off.
The car keys had been left downstairs with Felicity’s neighbour, because—she said crossly, demonstrating Felicity’s annoyance for her—Felicity had waited for Alice to arrive when she had said she would. Apologies and smiles. Alice drove the car back to number 43. The four of them got the packages out to the car. No wonder they were so heavy.
They stood around debating where to take the packages. The rubbish dump? No, not at that hour of the day. Down to the river? No, they would be observed. Better drive out to some leafy suburb like Wimbledon or Greenwich, and see what they could find. They were on their way through Chiswick, crawling through heavy traffic, when they saw, in a side street, big corrugated iron gates and the sign: “Warwick & Sons, Scrap Metal Merchants.” They turned out of the traffic and round the block and past the gates. The place seemed deserted. Alice double-parked while Bert went in, coolly, like a customer, and hung about for a bit. But no one came. He sprinted back, face flushed, eyes reddened, white teeth and red lips flashing in his black beard. Jasper caught the fever at once. Alice, admiring them both, backed the car between the great gates and stopped. It was a large yard. In this part of London, capacious plots of ground accommodated large houses and big gardens. But this place had some ramshackle brick-and-corrugated-iron sheds at the back with heavy locks on them, and otherwise everywhere were heaps of metal pipes, bits of cars, rusting iron bars, bent and torn corrugated iron. Brass and copper gleamed unexpectedly, and stacks of milky plastic roofing showed that these merchants dealt in more than metal. There were ancient beams piled near the gates, oak from the look of them (two of these would be just the thing for the roof of poor 43) and, all around these beams, an area where every kind of rubbish had found a place, including a lot of cardboard cartons, rapidly disintegrating, that had in them more metal, and plastic bottles, plastic cups. This was it. Jasper and Caroline were out of the car in a moment, and they and Bert wrestled the packages out of the car, and let them fall near the pile of beams. Alice’s eyes seemed to be bursting; black waves beat through her. But she had to keep the car running. Through her fever she saw how Bert had already stood up, looking around, the job done; how Caroline had come back to the car, was getting in; while Jasper, deadly, swift, efficient, was rubbing soil into the smooth professional surfaces of the packages, and scarring them with a bit of iron he had snatched up from a heap, working in a fury of precise intention and achievement. That was Jasper! Alice thought, proud of him, her pride singing through her. No one who had not seen Jasper like this, at such a moment, could have any idea! Why, beside him Bert was a peasant, slowly coming to himself and seeing what Jasper was doing, and then joining in when Jasper had virtually finished the job. Those two packages did not look anything like the sleek brown monsters of a few minutes before, were already just like all the other rubbish lying around, would easily be overlooked.