Doris Lessing

In the morning, after their breakfast coffee, he stood silently and balefully near her until she gave him the fare to Dublin. Then he said that he was going to meet Jack and talk things over. If he was not back tonight, he would be tomorrow, and she must tell Bert that they were going to Ireland on Tuesday, early.

He left. She thought: Is he going on one of his things, then - cottaging, cruising...? She believed not. He wouldn't risk it, not with his whole soul set on the trip to Ireland. Was "Jack," then, like him? No, she was sure not. Talking about Jack, it was how he talked about Bert, how he talked about the men with whom he had this particular relationship: admiring, dependent, you could say passive... but who was it now who set the pace, making Bert go to Ireland, making Jack take them? No, not simple at all, this younger-brother thing.

She had the whole day. Alone, you could say.

Philip had climbed up into the attic - she must go up and help him, stand by him, or he would start feeling ill again. Jim - where was Jim, what was wrong? He had not been in since yesterday.

Faye and Roberta? She had heard them come in very late. Pat said they went to late-night movies, and then on to parties. Their other life - women. The close, sweet, bitchy - as far as Alice was concerned - cloying, claustrophobic world of women. Not for her! But they were welcome to it. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and all that.... Ten in the morning, and Mary and Reggie were still in bed. Mary had come down, made mugs of coffee, taken them up, and they lay, no doubt, side by side, in that amazing double bed, which had a proper headboard and little built-in side tables. Even the thought of that bed, the life that the bed implied, made Alice feel threatened. Stuck together for a lifetime in that bed, drinking cups of coffee, looking at people who were not like themselves in that cautious keep-off way.

Where was she going to get money. Where. She had to have it. Had to have money. Had to.

Sunday.

Good grief, it was only Sunday, six days after she and Jasper had left her mother's - had left home. She had achieved all that, in such a short time. Full of energy, she went up to the attic and to Philip, in his white overalls, a brave manikin moving about under the rafters of the attic. There was a horrible smell of rot.

"Two of these beams ought to be replaced," he said. "Dry rot. We'll have the whole house down."

Money. She had to have money.

Too early to ask Mary and Reggie. At some point a negotiation would take place. Already she could see their faces, the faces of the fucking bloody middle class, when the subject of money was on the agenda. God, how she hated them, the middle classes, pe

She thought: I've been living like this for years. How many? Is it twelve, now? No, fourteen - no, more... The work I've done for other people, getting things together, making things happen, sheltering the homeless, getting them fed - and as often as not pay- ing for it. Suppose I had put aside a little, even a little, of that money, for myself, what would I have now? Even if it were only a few hundred pounds, five hundred, six, I wouldn't be standing here sick with worry....

"How much will it cost to replace those two beams?"

"The wood, about fifty - second-hand. Though I could probably find what I need on a skip if we could borrow the car again.

"As for the labour..." he said with a defiant little laugh.

"Don't worry," said Alice. She was thinking: And he'll need help. He can't possibly shoulder great beams into place, stand about propping up beams; he'll need scaffolding or something. That means money.

She would go down and ask Mary and Reggie.

On the table a note, "We've gone to the Greenpeace demo. Love. Reggie and Mary." His writing. "Love"! She sat at the table and counted what she had left. She had thirty-five pounds.

She went up again and worked on with Philip, clearing rubbish out of the attics. Where did it all come from, always rubbish and rubbish, sacks of it again, old clothes, rags most of them, and an old carpet, quite fit for use, more old clothes. Junk. Junk? At the bottom of an old black tin trunk, under cracking and broken shoes, were layers of fine soft material, dresses wrapped in black tissue paper. Evening dresses. She threw them down through the trap door and jumped after them to look. Well, look at that! Three really beautiful evening dresses, each individually wrapped in the black tissue paper. The early thirties. One was of black and orange and yellow lace, with gold thread in it. It had a plain smooth bodice to the hips, then flared out in a lot of little points, like petals. The metallic smell of the gold lace made her want to sneeze.

Alice stood back away from the trap door up into the attic so that she was out of Philip's sight, and took off her sweat shirt. She slipped the bright dress on over her head. It would not go down past her hips, and stuck in a thick roll around her waist. There being no mirror in the house, she could not see what her arms and shoulders looked like, but she saw her sturdy freckled hands fidgeting at the roll of material, and felt that the dress was laying a claim on her, like an impostor demanding to be recognised. She stripped it off again angrily, and put back the sweat shirt, and with it a feeling of appropriateness and even virtue, as if she had been tempted briefly by the forbidden. She did not try on the apricot chiffon, with panels of silver beads back and front, some of them loosened, some vanished away as though a bead-eating insect had been at it. She held the sage-green lace with its swirling skirt up against her. It was tight above, with a pale-pink vee for modesty in the front, and the back cut down to the coccyx, with another little vee there. And afternoon dresses, the "New Look," quite glossy and good. Who had put them up there, unable to throw them away? Who had forgotten about them and gone off, leaving all those trunks up there? She showed the dresses to Philip, who laughed at them, but when she said she would get something for them, quite a lot, shrugged, unwillingly respectful.

She put them in a suitcase and took the bus to Bell Street, to a shop where her mother, being hard up, had sold some dresses. She had got over a hundred pounds.

Saturday. The markets were crammed. The woman in the shop that sold antique clothes was already busy with a customer who was after a white crepe-de-chine 1920s dress that had gold sequins in thick crusty-looking roses all round the hips. She paid ninety pounds for it. And it had a stain on the shoulder, which she said she would hide with a gold rose.

Alice went forward with her suitcase, saw the woman's eyes narrow in greed as she took in what was there. Alice was determined to get every pe

For that Alice got sixty pounds, though the woman kept saying a skilled sempstress would have to replace the missing beads, and it would cost - Alice had no idea what it would cost. Alice smiled politely, nodded, and stood her ground.

She went home with £250, knowing that the woman would sell those clothes for four times as much. But she was satisfied.