Doris Lessing

This meant - Alice faced it - a bad few days with Jasper. She would not be seeing much of him. He would be gone from here, perhaps returning briefly at night for some food, then off again. Once, in a very bad patch, Jasper had been like that for weeks, over a month, and she had lived in terror for the knock of the police at the door, and news about Jasper she had been dreading since she had first met him. When he was like that, he was not careful about much.

The only hope was his link with Bert. Steadying. Bert might save the situation without ever knowing that one existed.

A couple of hours passed, her spirits sinking lower, and then Philip came in, pleased, to say that his chum at the yard, with contacts where demolition work was going on, had all that 43 needed, and it was in a van outside. But Philip had spent the three hundred pounds and needed money to pay for delivery. Just as he was saying all this, while he and she crossed the hall, Jasper appeared, ru

Philip said cheerfully to the two men, "Could you give me a hand?" Jasper did not move. Bert did not move.

Ashamed for them, Alice said, "I'll come," and ran out with Philip. The driver, Philip, and she wrestled with the tank. It was heavy, and large - "The size of a small skip!" she joked - but they got it out of the van and up the path and into the house. There the driver said his responsibility ended. Philip ran out to fetch the guttering and the pipe and came in again. Bert and Jasper were in the kitchen, and the door was shut against her. She went straight in and said to them, "For shit's sake, can't you help us take the things up the stairs?"

They had been communicating disapproval, anger behind that closed door. Now Jasper said, "Alice, you've gone crazy, do you know that? What do you think you are doing? What is all that junk?" She made herself stand up to him: "The water tank up there is rotten, it's rusting. Do you want God knows how many gallons of water cascading down all over us?"

"I don't care," said Jasper. "If it does we'll just move on, as we always do."

This cold cruel treachery reached her guts, made her eyes go dark. When she recovered, she was holding on to the edge of the table for balance. She looked at him, ignoring Bert, who was putting on the kettle, cutting bread. "You know you like a decent place, somewhere nice. Of course you do...."

"Oh, bullshit," he said, melodramatic because she was destroying the image he liked to present to Bert. "Well, I'm not having anything to do with it. And what is it costing? What have we spent this time?" His little blue bright eyes, hard and round, which seemed this morning to be protruding out of the shallow creamy lakes around them, were full of hate for her. She knew what she had to expect the moment they were alone.

She appealed to Bert: "Please help. Philip and I can't manage. I mean, look at Philip!"

Slowly, with no change of expression, Bert buttered bread, then sat down. Then, glancing up and seeing her face, unexpectedly got up, as quick and full of energy as he had just been lethargic (but it was the energy of anger) and came out with her into the hall, where Philip, frail as a leaf, was standing by the great dark-grey water tank. Without a word, Bert bent and lifted, leaving Alice and Philip to fit themselves in, and, with him banging and bumping because he was so angry, the white teeth now showing between red lips stretched in a grimace of effort, the tank was raced upstairs, with much damage to the banisters. On the top floor, Bert simply dumped the tank, and ran down again. She and Philip heard the kitchen door slam again, excluding both of them. She looked apologetically at Philip. He was not looking at her. The tank had to go at the end of the little landing. The existing tank was in the attic. There was no way this tank could get through the trap door into the attic. Mystery! How did the first builders think a new tank would get itself up there, when the original tank, presumably put in before the roof went on, reached its natural end? They could only have believed that tanks had eternal lives.

But the distance from where the tank now sat, blocking the way at the head of the stairs, and where it had to be was too great for them to shift it.

Alice saw Philip distressed, ashamed, vulnerable.

"You wait," she said. She marched down the stairs, and saw Jasper coming out of the sitting room, where, of course, he had been searching for her money. Standing on the bottom step, she said, not knowing she was going to, "I've had enough, Jasper. If you can't help with a little thing like this, when I do so much, then I'm quitting."

Just as though he had not been going to walk past into the kitchen, he wheeled, and pounded up the stairs in front of her. When she got there, he was moving the tank with Philip to where it had to go. Here was the other Jasper, quick, intelligent, resourceful. For Philip said that board, thick papers, something, should be put under the tank to raise it, because of some tricky protruding pipes, and Jasper, seeing the stacks of newspaper that had come down from the attic, swiftly gathered them up and built them, while he knelt there beside it, into an eighteen-inch-high platform. Alice could see that though he slid the papers into place so swiftly, he was dealing to one side, as in a card game, newspapers with headlines of interest: "The Jarrow Marchers..."

"Hitler Invades..."

"The Battle of El Alamein..."

If the Irish comrades could see him now! thought Alice, watch- ing this deft, swift, accomplished work; and then how he, with Philip and herself, lifted the great tank, as if it weighed nothing, onto the top of the papers....

He had not looked at her. She was half fainting with the power of her beating heart. Oh, it was a dangerous thing, to threaten Jasper. Suppose he left her? Oh no, he would not, she knew that absolutely. He could not.

He ran off down the stairs, without a smile or a look, and she was left again with Philip. Who was distressed. By the atmosphere he had been in, which, she knew, was pure poison.

She knew he was thinking: If I had not put so much of myself into this house, perhaps I'd leave. Besides, he was upset about Pat's going.

She left Philip to his work, thinking that this time she had given him the money for the materials but none for his labour. Almost, she went back up the stairs to give him what she had.... She took a few steps down... almost went back up, hesitated, then - luck being on her side - she did it. She gave him what was left of the already denuded packet - not quite two hundred pounds, it was true, and nothing like what it should be - and went down into the kitchen, whose door she boldly opened, not caring that it had been shut to bar her out.