Doris Lessing

Zoë Devlin? But for some reason Alice would not go on with that thought. She felt sick, as if Zoë had quarrelled so horribly with her, as well as with her mother.

Perhaps she could actually pick out a suitable house and rob it? Clearly, she was not without talents in that direction. She felt confident that she could succeed.

But to become a thief, a real thief - that was a step away from herself. How could she describe herself as a revolutionary, a serious person, if she was a thief? Besides, if she was caught, it would be bad for the Cause. No. Besides, she had always been honest, had never stolen anything, not even as a child. She had not gone through that period of nicking things out of her mother's handbag, her father's pockets, the way some small children did. Never.

She could imagine herself choosing a likely house, watching for its inhabitants to be out, gliding into it, getting her hands around valuables - after all, she did know what was valuable and what wasn't. She wasn't one of those poor deprived kids who slipped in through an open window or an inadequately locked door and then did not know better than to steal a television or a video. But she could not really see herself with whatever it was: vase or rug or necklace, trying to sell it.

No, that was out.

She had to have money. Look at all these people, taking and taking... though Jim had said proudly last night that now he would contribute properly; he would pay his way, Alice needn't think that he wouldn't.

The only place she could think of was her father's. Not his house: it was too early to try that again. The firm. She sat, eyes shut, visualising the inside of the building that housed C. Mellings, Printers and Stationers. The safe in her father's office downstairs had cheques in it, but she did not want cheques. Downstairs, in the little stationery shop in the back, which her father had started in a small way as a trial and which had become so successful that sometimes he joked it financed everything else, was a safe full of cash. But only in the daytime, when the shop was full of people. Every night the cash was carried upstairs to the other safe. Next morning it was taken to the bank. How was she to get that money? She did not know the combination of the safe, and did not propose to turn professional with explosives, or whatever they used.

No, she needed something else; she needed cheek. It was Friday. They did better business downstairs on Friday than on any other day. The shop closed at five, and then the money was taken straight upstairs to be counted. It stayed in the safe until Monday morning. On Friday evening her father often went home early, because he and Jane and the infants liked to drive into Kent, where they had friends. A real, typical, bourgeois arrangement: Cedric and Jane stayed weekends with the Boults; the Boults would use Cedric and Jane's house for trips into London. Nothing like this had ever happened while Cedric still lived with Dorothy! Of course not. Her mother was too full of mine and thine: you couldn't see her sharing her house with another family. For some reason, this business of the weekends, the visiting Boults, always made Alice weak with anger.

But, with luck, her father would have left at three.

To reach her father's business, she had to go two stops further on the Underground than for her father's house, or her mother's - well, where her mother had been. She walked, deliberately not thinking too much, into the stationer's, where she was greeted, the boss's daughter. She walked through the shop, saying she wanted to see her father, then upstairs to the office floor. People were tidying their desks for the weekend. She said Hello, and How are you, and went into her father's office, where the secretary, Jill, sat in her father's chair, counting money from the till downstairs.

"Oh, he's gone then," said Alice, and sat down. Jill, counting, leafed through ten-pound notes, smiled, nodded, her mouth moving to indicate that she could not stop. Alice smiled and nodded, and got up to stand at the window, looking out. Indolent and privileged, daughter of the establishment, she leaned on the sill, watching the goings-on in the street, and listened to the sounds of paper sliding on paper.

Should she say her father had agreed she should have some money? If she did, Jill could not say no; and then, on Monday, her father, on being told, would not give her away, would not say: My daughter is a thief. She was about to say: He said I could have five hundred pounds. But then it happened, the incredible, miraculous luck that she now expected, since it happened so easily and often: in the next office the telephone rang. Jill counted on. The telephone rang and rang. "Oh, flick it," muttered Jill daintily, for she was the kind of good girl favoured by her father as secretary, and she ran next door to the telephone. Alice saw on the desk that there was a white canvas bag in which stacks of notes had already been put. She slid her hand in, took out a thick wad, then another, put them inside her jacket, and again leaned, her back to the room, at the window. Jill returned, saying that it was Mrs. Mellings, for her father, and it took Alice some moments to realise that this must be her mother, not the new Mrs. Mellings, who at this moment would be already on her way to the pleasures of a weekend in Kent.

She did not want to ask, Do you know her address?, thus betraying herself; but she asked, idly, "Where was she ringing from?" Jill again did not reply, since she was counting, but at last said, "From home. Well, I suppose so."

She was not noticing anything. Alice waited until Jill stood up, with three white canvas bags, notes and cheques and coins separately, and put them into the safe.

"Oh well, I'll be off," Alice said.

"I'll tell your father you were here," said Jill.

When Alice arrived home, she counted what she had. It was a thousand pounds. At once she thought: I could have taken two thousand, three - it would come to the same thing. In any case, when they know the money has gone, when they remember I was there, they'll know it was me. Why not be hung for a sheep as for a lamb?

Well, it would have to do.

Alice thought for some time about where to put it. She was not going to tell Jasper. At last she zipped open her sleeping bag, slid the two packets of notes into it, and thought that only the nastiest luck would bring anyone to touch it, to find what she had.

Friday night. Jasper and Bert had been gone for ten days. They had said they would come at the weekend.

Thinking Pat, where's Pat?, she went down to the kitchen, and found Pat, with her jacket on, a scarf, and her bright scarlet canvas holdall. She was scribbling a note, but stopped when she saw Alice, with a smile that was both severe and weak, telling Alice that Pat had not wanted to face the business of good-byes, and would now hurry through them.

"I'm off, Alice," she said, quickly, hardly allowing her eyes to meet Alice's.

"You're through with Bert?"

Tears rilled Pat's eyes. She turned away. "Some time I've got to break it. I've got to."

"Well, it's not for any outsider to say," remarked Alice. Her heart was sick with loss, surprising her. It seemed she had become fond of Pat.

"I've got to, Alice. Please understand. It's not Bert. I mean, I love him. But it's the politics."

"You mean, you don't agree with our line about the IRA?"

"No, no, not that. I don't have any confidence in Bert."

At least, she did not say, as well, "in Jasper."

She said, "Here is my address. I'm not fading out. I mean, I don't want to make any dramatic breaks, that kind of thing. I'll be working in my own way - the same sort of thing, but what I see as rather more... serious."

"Serious," said Alice.

"Yes," she insisted. "Serious, Alice. I don't see this tripping over to Ireland, on the word of somebody called Jack." She sounded disgusted and fed up, and the word "Jack" was blown away like fluff. "It's all so damned amateur. I don't go along with it."