“Anyway,” said Faye, “it serves them right.”
This was one of “her” remarks, which they all habitually covered over, ignored, or—like Roberta now—soothed away.
“Faye, dear,” she said. “That’s not very nice.”
Faye tittered and tossed her head. Her eyes were glittering, her cheeks flushed.
Alice said stubbornly, “I don’t think it’s right. It’s not what we decided.”
Jocelin said soberly, taking her seriously, “You weren’t here when it was discussed. The thing is, these electronic controls aren’t absolutely reliable. Not the things I’ve got, anyway. Of course, there are good ones, but don’t forget, I’ve just put this and that together.”
“Then why not set them to go off in the middle of the night, not when people are around?”
“We did think about that. But it’s a question of how to make the greatest impact. A few windows in the middle of the night—and so what? But this way, it’ll be front page in all the papers tomorrow, and on the news tonight.”
Jocelin, having said, or pronounced this, looked away from Alice; and none of them looked at her. She understood now that she felt excluded not only because she had not been here at the crucial discussion, but because the crucial discussion had taken place “behind her back”—as she felt it—so that she could not be there to say things they did not want to hear. They had known—felt, if not thought—that she would protest, say no, say it was wrong; then they would have been forced to listen, to think. And so, without anyone’s actually planning it, the five had discussed it when she was well out of the way.
And where was Caroline?
It turned out that Caroline, learning that the bombs would be set to go off at a certain time regardless of possible casualties, had said she would have nothing to do with it.
It was Jocelin who told Alice this, in a nonjudging voice, but cold with disapproval. Cold, Alice thought, because of the need to put a distance between her and what she had felt when Caroline had said that. Oh yes, Alice knew what had happened; she could reconstruct the moment, from what was on all their faces now. The plan had nearly been given up, because of Caroline’s decisiveness. Now, as they remembered that argument—which they were all doing—their faces had identical looks of cold uneasiness.
If only I had been there, thought Alice, I could have backed Caroline up; between us we could have swung things the other way.
Alice sneaked a look—she did not dare more—at Bert, who knew she was likely to be looking at him! This was a repetition of Pat! Pat had said Bert was an amateur, at that meeting when the decision was first made to “join the IRA,” when a lot of the inhabitants of this house had simply left. Since then she had sometimes, affectionately, called him an amateur. Probably Caroline too had called him “amateur.”
Alice thought: Pat, Jim, Philip, and now Caroline. She was my friend, she was my real friend.
Already they were talking again. At two o’clock Jocelin, Faye, and Jasper would go off to the Underground, to the car, which there was no reason to believe would not be exactly where it had been left this morning. To set the explosives to go off would take Jocelin five minutes, Faye aiding her with her quick, clever fingers. No one need take any notice of three people with the bonnet of the car briefly up, making minor adjustments to something, rearranging the contents of the boot, checking the set of a wheel.
Jocelin was saying that there was no need for the others to be at the scene at all. There was nothing for them to do. Redundant. Adding to the danger. She suggested that Bert and Roberta and Alice should stay here, and put the kettle on at five-thirty. And how about Alice making some of her soup; they would all be dead with hunger by then.
“No,” said Faye, smiling, all her sharp little teeth showing. “Absolutely no.” Charming and pettish, spoiled and whimsical, she swam her eyes at Roberta, then at them, and said, “I must have my Roberta. I
must
. I must!”
“Absolutely,” said Bert, hearty. “And I and Alice will be there, too. No argument! Vote taken! That’s it, then.”
Laughter, even from Alice, who felt again one of the family.
Two o’clock. Off went Jocelin and Faye and Jasper.
Jasper did not remember to give Alice a smile or a look. He was in animated talk that looked like a flirtation—with Faye. They were all laughing loudly as they went off.
Roberta sat in a huddle at the table, silent, morose. Now it could be seen how much she did not like this, had not wanted Faye in this danger.
With the three gone, the remaining three were edgy, quiet, far from elated. They had to wait.
It would take Faye, Jasper, Jocelin ten minutes to get to the Underground. Then probably half an hour, depending on how the trains were running, to reach the car. Say three-quarters of an hour; there were two changes. Ten minutes from the Underground to the car. Then it was hard to judge exactly how long it would take to drive the car to the scene of the crime. The rush hour would not have started. But there might be a lot of traffic; who could tell? That journey could take fifteen minutes or, with bad luck, take forty. Somewhere between half past three and four o’clock, Jasper and Faye—not Jocelin; she would have been dropped off along the route—would be looking for a parking place outside the great hotel. They might have to drive round and round it for some time. There was also the question of traffic wardens. If they appeared, while Jasper and Faye were still driving about looking, then they would go away for a few minutes and come back after the wardens had gone. If the wardens appeared after the car was parked, it didn’t matter; the worst that could happen—Faye had said—was that they would be too close when the car exploded.
The bombs would have been set to go off at a quarter to five, later only if the traffic looked particularly bad.
There would be no point in Alice, Bert, and Roberta’s leaving until three, they thought, but at half past two they could not bear to wait even one more moment. As they got up from the table, there was a knock on the front door. A civilised knock, not the police.
“I’ll go,” said Alice. “It’s probably Felicity with something she’s giving me from Philip.” In Felicity’s house had been left a little marquetry table made by Philip, and she had said she would bring it round, for Alice. This was partly, as Alice knew, a need to rid herself of everything that reminded herself of Philip and the complex emotions that he evoked, and partly a generous impulse: she said that she felt Philip would have liked Alice to have it.
At the door stood a man Alice did not know. Having expected only Felicity and a table and a brief emotional moment, being literally ill with apprehension and excitement, she was not prepared to ask him in, or to deal with him or with any situation he was bringing.
“Is Miss Mellings in?” he enquired, and she automatically made the usual assessments from his voice: middle-class, British, an official of some kind, probably.
“I am Alice Mellings,” she said, “but, excuse me, I am in a very great hurry.”
“If you will be kind enough to give me a moment,” he said.
Oh, Christ, she was thinking, oh, shit, we have to
leave:
for now that the decision had been taken to go, she felt that not one more second should be wasted. “Well, can’t you come back?”
“Yes, I can come back. I certainly will. But in the meantime, you could assist me with some information.”
Alice thought that this might have something to do with the Council’s decision to do up the two houses; he might be someone from the Council. She was not really thinking at all. A flash of recognition, or of warning, that this man’s manner, his style, his way of talking were not appropriate to the Council situation, but to another one altogether, went past her.
“What?” she said hurriedly. “What is it?”
“Have you any information about a man called Andrew Connors?”
She stared at him, a wild inappropriate laughter threatening her. She said, with a sudden derisiveness, like a jeer, “Don’t tell me that you are still another phony bloody American? No”—she caught herself up—“of course not; English accent; well, what’s in an accent?”
Her visitor looked startled, not surprisingly, and took his time in answering. At last he said, with a certain quiet authority that was not unlike Gordon O’Leary’s, “I agree, Miss Mellings, that accents are not always what they seem. But about Andrew Connors—I need some information about him.”
In her normal condition Alice at this point would have said: “Indeed? And who are you”—that kind of thing—but as it was she itched with the need for him to be gone, so that she and the others could leave. She was in a fever, a rage, of impatience. She said, “Well, what sort of information? I don’t know anything much. Anyway, why don’t you ask Gordon O’Leary, he seems to know everything.”
A pause. If she had had her wits about her, she might not have liked the way this man suddenly focussed on her: narrowed eyes; a close, expert inspection.
“Well, perhaps I will,” he remarked.
“Yes, and he can tell you about it all. Look, I do have to go in, I am so sorry.…” She was about to go in, shutting the door on him, when “niceness,” the hospitable person in Alice who could never bear to disappoint, or seem unfriendly, caused her to add, disastrously, “And when you see him, just tell him from me that if any other little consignment of
matériel
or anything else turns up here, we are going to throw it straight back into the street and leave it there.” She said this quite brightly, even smiling, as if she had said, “When you see him, say hello from me.”
She had turned away, was about to go in.
“Just a minute, Miss Mellings.”
“Oh, God,” she cried, “oh, please, I have to go.”
“All right. So you have said. But there is something I have to discuss with you.”
“Then let’s discuss it, but not now. Anyway, I have already discussed it. I keep saying, we are not taking orders from Russians or anybody else. You don’t seem to understand that, comrade … You didn’t tell me your name.”
“My name is Peter Cecil,” he said.
“Peter Cecil?” she said, and might have laughed again. “Well, your accent is really perfect. Bloody marvellous. Congratulations.” She did give a little laugh here, girlish and merry, and though she did not really take him in, because of her pounding heart, her general overstimulation, she looked at him enough to see that he really did seem the essence of an Englishman, to match his name.
“Thank you,” he said, pleasantly. “Perhaps you would care to have lunch?”
“Yes. But I was going to say, you don’t seem able to take it in, but we are British, you understand? British communists.” She hesitated and added, since the situation seemed to demand elucidation: “Freeborn British communists.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, where can we meet? Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? Well, why not? Tomorrow’s all right. Do you know the Taj Mahal? That restaurant in the High Street?”
“Very good. Tomorrow. At one. Thank you for your time, Miss Mellings.”
“Not at all,” said she, forgetting him entirely, as she ran in to the others, who were saying: “For God’s sake, Alice, come on, will you. We’ve got to go. Get a move on.”
It was twenty to three. At the station they waited ten minutes for a train, much longer than they expected. At Baker Street they sat in the train, the doors open, with people drifting in, taking their time, for another seven. They joked they could not remember waiting for so long before. At Green Park they waited again. They were frantic with suspense; felt like bombs themselves, which could go off. Coming out of the Underground at three-thirty, Bert burst into a run, and the other two ran after him, to slow him down. “Stop it,” said Roberta, irritable. “We have to be unnoticed, remember.”
No one looking at Roberta was likely not to notice her.
She was very pale, was sweating, her face was tragic with seriousness.
They walked rapidly round the hotel, past the people on the pavements. The three did not look at one another or, very much, at the possible victims. Alice was thinking: But people might be
killed
.… Oh no, that couldn’t happen! Inside her chest, however, a pressure was building up, painful, like a cry—but she could not let it be heard. Like the howl of a beast in despair, but she could not reach it, to comfort it.
What were the others thinking? Roberta—well, that was easy, she thought only of Faye. Bert? He seemed not much different from his genial self; but surely he must be wondering, like Alice, Will this girl be killed? This old woman? Perhaps this one, or that one?
There was no sign of Jasper and Faye. Having circumambulated the hotel twice, Roberta said, “There’s no point in this. And we shouldn’t be together.” Without even looking at them, she walked off by herself and stood on the opposite pavement, from which she could see the side of the hotel in front of her, and on her left the street along which Faye and Jasper could reasonably be expected to drive.
Bert went off, without looking at Alice, to stand on the pavement opposite the front of the hotel. Alice, then, logically, could have gone to stand on the side where Roberta was not, but decided that the front was best, and stood near Bert.
It was a quarter to four.
No sign of the car.
A bus very slowly went by. Jocelin sat downstairs near the window, looking at them. She mouthed at them, “A—quarter—to—five.” Then she briefly held up her left hand with its five fingers spread, lowered it, held it up again, this time with four fingers showing, bent down the forefinger, quickly again mouthed, “A—quarter—to—five,” and then stared ahead of her.
“I think,” said Bert facetiously, “that it will be a quarter to five.”
Four o’clock.
The great hotel, with its look of sedate luxury, brooded massively there with people teeming about it. Alice thought, Well, perhaps something has gone wrong and they won’t come. It’ll be all right.
“Shall we tell Roberta it’ll be a quarter to five?” she asked Bert. He said, “No, we can’t draw attention to ourselves.” Then he changed his mind and ran across the street, in and out of the traffic. Roberta was standing on the very edge of the pavement, absolutely still. Alice watched Bert go up to her, say something, then take her by the arm, apparently urging her to stand in a less noticeable place. Roberta shook off his hand on her arm, and stayed exactly where she was. Bert stood beside her for a minute, then slowly came back, this time waiting for the lights to change.