Doris Lessing

"What were you trying for?"

"A printing firm in Southwark. But I don't know all this new technology - I learned the old printing. I did a year's course, I thought it would get me somewhere."

"Printing! You didn't say. But there must be hundreds of little firms all over the country who still use it for special jobs."

"Then I must have applied to half of them in the last four years."

"My father has a printing firm. A small one. They do all kinds of things. Pamphlets and brochures and catalogues."

"He won't be using the old way for long."

"I'll write to him. Why not? He's supposed to be a fucking socialist."

"What's the use, I'm black."

"Wait, I'm thinking."

He was still tense and hot and miserable, but, she thought, better. Like a nun, or his sister, she sat holding his hand, smiling gently down at him.

"Yes," she said at last. "I'll write to my father. I'll do that. Make him practise what he preaches. He's had blacks before, anyway."

She could see he was, in spite of himself, begi

"I'll write it now," she said.

In the backpack in which she seemed to keep half her life she burrowed and came up with a biro and writing pad.

Dear Dad,

This is Jim

"What's your name, Jim?"

"Mackenzie."

"I have a cousin who married a Mackenzie."

"My grandfather was Mackenzie. Trinidad." j "Then perhaps we are related."

A small gust of laughter blew through him, and left him smiling. He sighed, relaxed, turned towards her, put his hand under his cheek. He would be asleep soon.

She wrote:

This is Jim Mackenzie. He can't get a job. He is a printer. Why don't you give him a job? You are supposed to be a fucking progressive? He has been out of work for four years. In the name of the Revolution.

Alice.

She neatly folded the letter, put it in a nice blue envelope (choosing the blue in preference to cream, for some reason), and addressed it.

Jim's lids were drowsing.

"Why don't you take this round tomorrow. Your cut won't show."

She pulled back the sleeve gently. He did not resist her. It was a really bad cut, which would leave a thick scar. It needed stitching. Never mind.

"I like you, Alice," he stated. "You are a really sincere person, you know what I mean?" He did not add "unlike the others."

She could have wept, knowing that what he said was true, feeling confirmed and supported. She stayed near him till he slept, went out into the dark hall, switched on the light with pride and with the knowledge of what that little act meant, what it had cost, would cost: she pressed a tiny switch on the wall, and electrons obediently flowed through cables, because the woman in Electricity had so ordered it.

Money. Where from?

Standing there, surveying the hall, so pleasant now (though she knew that really she ought to get carpet foam and do over the carpet, which after all had been folded up in the dust of the skip), she saw that Philip had mended the little cupboard under the stairs that the policeman had kicked in.

At this moment, a knock, and with a premonition she went to open the door, a look of authority already on her face.

It was the policewoman she had seen in the police station. At the gate stood her partner, a young man Alice had not seen before.

"Good evening," said Alice, "can I help you?"

She stood with the door open behind her, so that the order of the hall could be properly seen; she saw the policewoman taking it in. The young policeman was, as Alice was not surprised to see, trying to locate with his eyes the place in the garden where these crazies had buried...

"Does a fames Mackenzie live here?"

"Yes, he does," said Alice at once.

"Can I speak to him?"

"You could, but he's not here."

"When will he be back?"

"He might not be back tonight. He's gone to visit friends in Highgate."

"He wasn't here this weekend, then?"

"He was here last night."

"He was here all last night?"

Alice said, "Yes. Why?"

"He was here all through the evening?"

"Yes, he had supper here, and then we spent the evening playing cards."

There had been the slightest tremor in Alice's voice; she had been going to say, "We all spent the evening," but remembered in time that "all" might not be prepared to stick their necks out for Jim, if "all" could be reached and warned in time.

"You and he were here?"

"And a friend of his. A white boy. William something-or-other."

Alice knew that the little hitch in the smoothness had reached the policewoman, even if only subliminally. But it was all right, she thought; she could tell that from the indecision of the woman's ma

Alice yawned, put her hand over her mouth, said, "Sorry, we were up late...," and yawned again, offering the right sort of smile to the policewoman. Who smiled briefly in return, as she again looked carefully into the reassuring hall.

"Thanks," she said, and went off to the gate, where she and her companion resumed their sharp-eyed stroll around the guilty streets.

Alice glanced quietly into Jim's room. He was asleep.

She then went into the kitchen and wrote a letter to her mother, which she would have ready for Monica Winters, who would certainly be turning up here in the next day or two.

While she was doing this, within a few minutes of one another came Jasper, then Pat and Bert, then Roberta and Faye. The six sat round the table in the kitchen, with an assortment of take-away, which they had brought in separately and would now consume together: pizzas, and fish and chips, and pies. Alice made coffee, set the mugs around, and sat at the head of the table. Her happiness because of this scene was so strong she closed her eyes so that it would not beam out in great mellow streams and betray her to the ster

Bert wanted to know about Jack. Jasper reported. The glances exchanged by Faye and Roberta told Alice that trouble would ensue.

It did. Faye demanded, in her pert, pretty way that did nothing to hide her seriousness, why all these plans had been made without a meeting to get everyone's approval? Pat said she agreed: Jasper had no right to take it on himself....

This, Alice knew, was partly directed at Bert, who had been Jasper's accomplice.

Jasper, and then Bert, said that no one was being committed to anything. All that was pla

"A group of what?" demanded Faye, showing her pretty little teeth.

"Yes," said Pat, though with a little edge of humour that told Alice it would be all right, "are we still committing all the vast resources of the CCU, or only ourselves?"

Alice saw that Roberta would have laughed at this, had Faye's mood permitted it.

Bert, because he wanted to reinstate himself with Pat, took command and, his white teeth showing in the thickets of his beard while he offered a steady, responsible, forceful smile, said, "I can appreciate the comrades' reservations. But in the nature of things" - and here he twisted his red lips to signal and to share with them the perspectives of this operation - "certain approaches have to be tentative and even, apparently, ad hoc. After all, the meeting with Jack was fortuitous. It was chance, and became productive, thanks to Comrade Jasper. It was he who made the first approaches...." Alice could see that it was not going to be easy for any of them to admit obligation to Jasper, even though he was being correctly impersonal, sitting somewhat to one side of the scene, waiting for their approval, the image of a responsible cadre.

But just then there was a sound in the hall, the door to outside shut, and Jasper, jumping up to look, reported it was Philip going down the street. The fact that he had not come into the kitchen meant he felt unwanted, and this brought Faye in with, "And there is no place we can talk in this house now. Alice has seen to that."