Doris Lessing

She said, definitely, "It's no good, Comrade Andrew. I couldn't do it. I don't mean the waiting - for orders - no matter how long it was."

"I believe you," he said, nodding.

"I wouldn't mind how dangerous. But I couldn't live like that. I would go mad."

He nodded, sat silent a little. Then, sounding for the first time humorous, even whimsical, "But, Comrade Alice, I have been getting daily, sometimes hourly, reports of your transformation of that pigsty there." The dislike he put into that word was every bit as strong as her parents' could ever have been. Leaning forward, he took her hand, smiling humorously, and turned it so that it lay, the back upwards, in his strong square hand. Alice's hand shrank a little, but she made it lie steady. She did not like being touched, not ever! Yet it was not so bad, his touch. The firmness of it - that made it possible. Along her knuckles, a crust of white paint.

He gently replaced her hand on her knee and said, "You'll have the place like a palace in no time."

"But you don't understand. We aren't going to live in that house as they do. We aren't going to consume, and spend, and go soft and lie awake worrying about our pensions. We're not like them. They're disgusting." Her voice was almost choked with loathing. Her face twisted with hatred.

There was a long silence, during which he decided to leave this unpromising subject. (But, thought Alice, he would not be abandoning it for long!) He offered her some coffee. There was an electric kettle, and mugs and sugar and milk on a tray on the floor. He quickly, efficiently, made coffee.

Then he began to talk about all the people in Number 43. His assessment of them, Alice noted, was the same as hers. That pleased and flattered her, confirmed her in her belief in herself. He spoke nicely about Jim, about Philip; but did not linger on questions. Bert he seemed to dismiss. Pat he wanted to know more about, where she had worked, her training. Alice said that she did not know, had not asked. "But, Comrade Alice," he reproved her in the gentlest way, "it is important. Very important."

"Why is it? I haven't had a job since I left university. I've done all right."

This caused a check or hitch in the flow of their talk; he was suppressing a need to expostulate. There's a lot bourgeois about him, she was thinking, but only mildly critical because of her now established respect for him.

Jasper - but he simply would not talk about Jasper. Because, she thought, of her link with him. She didn't have to ask, though: Comrade Andrew did not have much time for Jasper. Well, he'd see!

Roberta and Faye. He asked many questions about them, but what interested him was their lesbianism. Not out of prurience, or anything Alice could dislike: there was a total noncomprehension there. He simply had no idea of it. No experience, ever, Alice guessed. He wanted to know what the women's commune was like that Roberta and Faye frequented. What the co

What Alice said was, "There are many different formulations in the Women's Movement. I would say that Faye and Roberta represent an extreme."

Then there were Maty and Reggie; and, as she expected, Comrade Andrew refused to dismiss them as she wanted to. Precisely what she disliked most about them was what interested him: she knew that he wondered whether they could be persuaded to become sleeping partners in the revolution, a phrase that she used and he approved with a dry smile and a nod.

Alice didn't know. She doubted it. They were naturally con-servers. (Not that she had anything against Greenpeace. On the contrary.) They were, in short, bourgeois. In her view, Andrew should discuss it with them. She could not answer for them.

This, she knew, cut across the underlying premise of the conversation: that she was willingly acting as his aide in assessing possible recruits. For something or other. Not stated. Understood.

Did they plan - number 43 - to take in more members of their squat or commune?

"Why not? There's plenty of room."

"I agree, the more the better."

And so the talk went on, reaching back, for some rather tense minutes, to her childhood. Alice's mother did not really interest Comrade Andrew, but Cedric Mellings, that was a different matter. How big was his business? How many employees? What were they like?

Alice's brother: Alice decided not to say Humphrey worked in a top airline firm. "Oh, don't waste your time on him," she said.

More cups of coffee, and some rather satisfying talk about the state of Britain. Rotten as a bad apple, and ready for the bulldozers of history.

When Alice said she had to go, she was expecting Jasper, and stood up, Andrew did, too, and seemed to hesitate. Then he said quickly, for the first time sounding awkward, "You have been with Jasper a long time, haven't you?"

"Fifteen years." Knowing what was coming, recognising it from many such moments in the past, she turned to go. He was beside her, and she felt his arm lightly about her shoulders.

"Comrade Alice," he said. "It's not easy to understand... why you choose such a... relationship."

The usual ration of affront, resentment, even anger was in her. But this was Comrade Andrew, and she had decided that what came from him was, had to be, different. She said, "You don't understand. No, you don't understand Jasper."

His arm still lay there, so gently that she could not find it a pressure. He said, gently, "But, Alice, surely you could..." Do better was what he wanted to say.

She turned to face him, with a bright, steady smile.

"It's all right," she said, like a schoolgirl. "I love him, you see."

Incredulity made his smile ironic, patient.

"Well, Comrade Alice..." He allowed it to trail away, in humour. "Come in any time," he said.

"Why don't you come in and see our palace?"

"Thanks, I will."

And so she went home, her mind a dazzle of questions.

She had been going up to admire her newly painted room, but something took her to Jim's door. She knocked, heard nothing, went in. Jim lay on the top of his sleeping bag, facing her, his eyes open.

"Are you all right, Jim?"

No reply. He looked so dreadful.... She went to him, knelt, put her hand on his. It was dry, very hot.

"Jim! What's wrong?"

"Ah, hell, what's the point?" came out of him in a choking sob, and he put his arm over his face.

Under the loose sleeve was a red wound that went from elbow to wrist. Wide. Nasty. It seemed filled with red jelly.

"Jim, what happened?"

"I got in a fight." The words came out of a sobbing smother of frustration and rage. "No, leave it, it'll heal, it'll be all right, it is clean."

He seemed to be fighting with himself as he lay there, banging his fist to his head, clenching up his legs, then shooting them out straight.

"But the police didn't get you."

"No. But they will know I was there by now. There's someone who'll make sure of that! What's the use? There's no way you can get out of trouble, you can't get out, what's the use of trying."

"Did you try for a job?"

"Yes, what's the use?" And he turned over and lay on his back, arms loose by his side.

She had known it. There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.