Doris Lessing

Alice slid back into her place, saying, to their querying, ready-for-any-emergency looks, "It's all right, it was nothing."

Roberta and Faye, Mary and Reggie, Philip and Jim, Pat and Alice sat around all evening, compelled into being a family by the magic of that soup, and the red wine that Reggie had contributed, and the good bread, healthy wholemeal, and the frivolous white that Faye insisted on.

This was another evening of pleasure, and Jim was full of tales about Alice's father and the others working with him, twelve or more, and how lucky Alice was to have such a father - while Alice smiled and kept a lock on her tongue.

Next morning Alice was alone in the house when there was a tumult of thudding knocks on the door, and a voice screamed, "Come out, you, come out of there, come out."

Alice went out to Monica, who was transformed by fury, ready to kill, as Alice could see. The child in the pushchair, poor ugly little thing, grizzled steadily.

"Why did you do that? Why did you send me there? What have I done to you?" And Monica began kicking out at Alice's legs, and beating about with her arms.

"What is the matter? What happened? Didn't she take you in?"

"There's no one there," screeched Monica. "Why did you send me there?"

"Well, she's only out shopping, isn't she? She'll be back."

Monica stopped screeching, her limbs stopped flailing, and she stared, appalled, at Alice. "It's an empty house," she said. "No one there. There's a 'For Sale' notice up."

"You went to the wrong house," said Alice, vaguely. She was, indeed, struck by something, a thought, or a memory: cases on a kitchen table, filled with crockery wrapped in newspaper. She stared at Monica, who stared at her.

"There's a mistake," said Alice, who was as pale as Monica, and as breathless by now. "Something's wrong."

"It's you who's wrong," said Monica, with a sudden ugly laugh. She still stared at Alice, as if unable to believe what she saw. "Why did you do this to me? What for? You get some kind of a kick out of it, I suppose. You're evil," she pronounced. "You are all evil and mad in this house." And, bursting into wails, she went ru

Dear Mum,

This is Monica. She is living with her baby in one of those ghastly hotels, you know. Well, if you don't you fucking well ought to know. Why don't you take her in? It's the least you can do. You've got three empty rooms now. Monica and her baby are living in one shitty room, with no place she can cook or anything.

Your daughter,

Alice.

p.s. And there is a husband, too.

She went in and sat on the bottom step of the staircase. Sat there for a long time, her mind blank. Then she began a curious movement, rubbing her hand over her face, as though feeling for something or wanting something. It was quite a hard movement, dragging the flesh this way and that, and it went on for some time, perhaps ten minutes. A task she had to perform, a necessity; an observer could have thought she had been ordered to do this, to sit on that step with her fingers pushing her flesh about over her face.

Then she methodically collected her bag, and went off to the Underground, walked up the streets to her mother's house, and stood outside it looking at the "For Sale" sign. She could not take it in. Using her key, she briskly admitted herself. But inside it was as if something had sucked out furniture, leaving the spirit of the house intact. The cooker was in the kitchen, though the refrigerator was gone. Curtains hung pleasantly in the windows, and it seemed that if she turned her head away and back, then the table where she had sat, where she had served her soup to her mother, sometimes to her mother's guests, might reappear. The rest of the house was the same. In the bedrooms were the curtains she had known all her life, and the fitted carpets remained, but beds and cupboards had been spirited away. Alice went up to her room, and squatted down in the corner where her bed had been, the narrow white bed she had slept in since she was ten years old. On the window was a blue-and-red peacock she had stencilled there on a wet afternoon when the garden was blanked out with grey rain. A 1980 calendar hung on a wall; she had kept it because she liked the picture: Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere. She identified with that girl who stared out, trapped by bottles, tangerines, minors, the counter, a wall of people with ugly faces.

In the garden there was sunlight, and cats on a lawn that needed cutting.

She went downstairs, like a sleepwalker. Then, in a frenzy, having come awake, furious, betrayed, deadly, she tore down curtains from room after room, bundled them, and staggered out of the house, forgetting to lock the door, hardly able to walk under the load. She saw a woman looking from a window and thought: So what, they are mine, aren't they? She managed to reach the corner, staggering. She stopped a taxi, returned in it to the house, made it wait while she ran in to drag down any other curtains that remained. Then she was driven back to the squat, where she spent all afternoon putting up her curtains where none had been, or replacing curtains for which she had no feeling. Anyway, these curtains were a thousand times better than the ones off the skips: lovely, real linen or silk or thick velvet, lined and interlined, fringed and tasselled.

How dare her mother give these away without even asking her, Alice?

When she went into the kitchen, Philip was there, and she knew from his ma

It was that he had had printed a leaflet, which he was taking to hotels, restaurants, shops, advertising his firm, Philip Fowler, Builder and Decorator; that he had to get real work, soon; that he thought he had contributed more than his share to this house, which was now in working order. If "they" wanted him to do any more, then he insisted on being paid; no, of course not at the proper rates, but enough to make it worth it.

The things that still needed to be done here were: Guttering to be replaced. Also a section of exterior drainpipe (he advised that this should be done soon, because the wall was badly soaked, and they were asking for dry rot). The cold-water tank in the attic was almost rusted through. In his opinion it might burst, flooding the house at any moment. The window sills were rotten on the top floor, and were letting in rain. And of course there was the question of the two rotten beams in the attic.

He laid before Alice a list of these necessities in order of urgency, the water tank being first.

Money. She would have to get some.

She sat a long time by herself, looking at the forsythia. It was wilting. Brilliant yellow petals lay on the floor. She went out, cut more branches, threw the dying ones away, and sat on through the afternoon, thinking.

Where was her mother, for a start? Did she imagine she could run away from Alice, just like that? Was she mad? Well, she must be, not telling Alice and Jasper... Here somewhere deep in her mind a thought began tugging and nagging, that her mother had told her. Well, if so, not in such a way that Alice could take it in.

Could she get some money from her mother? Not if she had just moved. With all that expense. Besides, she probably hadn't got over being angry; she needed time to cool down.

How about Theresa and Anthony?

Over this, Alice thought long and intently. Theresa would slip her another fifty pounds, but it wasn't enough. What was the good of fifty pounds? She had got the forty-odd due to her that week from Social Security, and it had melted away on things Philip needed. She thought that if she went there while the maid was cleaning, Theresa and Anthony out at work, she could nick the netsukes if she was quick and clever, and the maid would not notice. But the thought did not stay with her; affection drove it off. Theresa had been so good to her always, she could not do that to Theresa. Anthony was another matter. If it was only Anthony: she would take anything she could get from him!