Doris Lessing

Worry, worry, Alice sat worrying.

In came Jasper, smiling, jaunty, stepping like a dancer, and at once he said, "Oh, lovely," at the forsythia. There: people said this and that about him, but no one knew how sensitive he was, how kind. Now he bent and kissed her cheek; it was a thin papery kiss, but she understood that; understood when - rarely - she simply had to put her arms around him out of an exuberance of love, the instinctive shrinking, as though she held a wraith, something cold and wailing, a lost child. And he would try to stand up to it, the sudden blast of her love; she could feel a brave little determination to withstand it, and even an intention to return it. Which, of course, he could not - not the physical thing; she knew that what she felt as a warmth of affection was experienced by him as a demand for that.

He stood near her, beaming, positively dancing, with the excess of his pride and pleasure.

"So it was all right."

"Thirty pounds."

"A lot, surely?"

"They knew me," he said with pride.

"How was the cell?"

"Oh, not bad. They fed us - not bad. But I was with Jack-though it's an alias, you understand!"

"Yes, of course," she beamed back. "What I don't know..."

"... won't hurt you." He rubbed his hands, and began a light, smart quick-stepping about the kitchen: to the forsythia, which he touched delicately; to the window; and back to her. She put on the kettle, put coffee into a mug, and stood by the stove, so as to be standing, not sitting, while he moved so electrically and finely about.

"Bert doesn't know, either. Where is he? Bert?"

"But he told you, he's gone for the weekend with Pat."

"Oh yes... for the weekend - how long?" He was now standing still, threatened, frowning.

"Sunday night."

"Because we're going for a trip," he said. "He knew we were going, but not so soon. Jack says..."

"A fine Irish name," said Alice.

He chuckled, enjoying her teasing him. "Well, there are Jacks in Ireland." He went on, "And how did you know... But you always do, don't you," he said, with a flash of acid.

"But where else?" she wailed, humorously, as she always did when he was surprised by what to her was obvious. "You and Bert and Jack are going to Ireland, because Jack is IRA?"

"In touch. In contact. He can arrange a meeting."

"Well, then!" said Alice, handing him a mug of black coffee, and sat down again.

He stood silent, stilled a moment. Then he said, "Alice, I've got to have some money."

Alice thought: "Well, that's that" - meaning, the end of this delightful friendliness. She strengthened herself for a fight.

She said, "I gave Bert the money he gave you for your fine."

"I've got to have my fare to Dublin."

"But you can't have spent your dole money!"

He hesitated. He had? How? She could never understand what he did with it, where it went - he had not had time for... that other life of his, he had been with Bert, with Jack!

"I said I'd pay Jack's fare - the fine cleaned him out."

"Was he fined thirty pounds, too?"

"No, fifteen."

"I have been spending and spending," said Alice. "No one chips in - only a bit here and there." She thought: At least Mary and Reggie will pull their weight, at least one can say that of their kind.... To the exact amount, no more, no less.

"You can't have spent all that," said Jasper. He looked as though she were deliberately punishing him. "I saw it. Hundreds."

"What do you suppose all this is costing."

Now - as she had expected - his hand closed around her wrist, tight and hurtful. He said, "While you play house and gardens, pouring money away on rubbish, the Cause has to suffer, do without."

His little blue eyes in the shallow depressions of very white, glistening flesh stared into hers, unblinking, as his grasp tightened. But long ago she had gained immunity from this particular accusation. Without resisting, leaving her wrist limp in his circle of bone, she looked hard back at him and said, "I see no reason why you should pay Comrade Jack's fare. Or expenses. If he hadn't met you, what would he have done for the fare?"

"But he's only going over for our sakes - so we can make contact."

She forced herself to fight him: "You picked up three weeks' money this week. You had a hundred and twenty pounds plus. And I paid your fine. You can't have spent more than at the most twenty pounds on train fares and snacks."

When she did this, let him know that she made this silent, skilled reckoning of what he spent, what he must be doing, he hated her totally, and showed it. He was white with his hatred. His thin pink lips, which normally she loved for their delicacy and sensitivity, were stretched in a colourless line, and between them showed sharp discoloured teeth. He looked like a rat, she thought steadily, knowing that her love for him was not by an atom diminished.

"Why don't you go and get some more from your fucking bloody mother, from her? Or from your father?"

She had not told him exactly where she had got all the money that had been spent so freely around this house, but of course he had guessed.

She said steadily, "I shall. When I feel I can. But I can't now."

He let go her wrist and stood up.

Now he is going to punish me, he's going to take his things into another room to sleep.

A long silence, while he fidgeted disconsolately about.

"Let's go out for a meal," he suggested, dolefully.

"Yes, let's." Her spirits swooped up again, although there had been no mention of spray-painting, and he had seen the scribbled slogans on the envelope on the table.

He said, nicely, "I am sorry about not going out painting tonight, Alice. But what's the sense? I don't want to draw attention to myself just before something important."

"Quite right, of course," she said. Thinking that in years of spray-painting, of darting about near the police and taunting them with their nearness, they had been caught only when they wanted to be. That was the truth of it.

Jasper wanted to talk about the two days down at Melstead, about the pickets, the excitement of it all, the arrest, the night in the cells - and about Jack. They went to an Indian restaurant, where he talked and talked, and she listened very carefully, matching what he said with her imaginings of it all. She paid for the meal. They went into a pub and he drank his usual white wine, and she, tomato juice.

Back at the house, she waited, tense, to see whether he would take his things up to another room, but he said nothing about it, only slid into his bag with a sigh that assuaged her; it was the sigh of a child finding a safe place.

He had not said anything more about money, but now he started again. That was why he had not taken his things out.

They argued, steadily, in the dark room, while the lights whirled over the ceiling. In the end she agreed to give him the ^ money for "Jack's" fare. She knew that for some reason it was important for Jasper to have it from her. Essential. There always had been these moments between them when she had to give way, against reason, against sense: he simply had to win. She knew that he had a hundred pounds, probably more. Perhaps even very much more. Once he had told her, in a mood of taunting cruelty that sometimes overtook him, that he had been saving up quietly all these years, enough money "to be rid of you forever."

This did not make any sense that she could see when she thought: but she felt the power of it.

His mother - well, Alice wasn't going to get involved even with the thought of all that dreary psychology, but no wonder he had problems with women.