Doris Lessing

"You wouldn't find a Mrs. Forrester in number two, love. I'm number two. And I am Mrs. Wood."

"That's fu

"No, I am sure not, no Forresters here," and the old girl laughed at her joke. Alice laughed. Then, as Alice had prayed she would, she said, "I'm going to put the kettle on. Would you like a cup of tea?" Oh yes, wouldn't she; and in went Alice, pushing the shopping trolley, opening the door into number 2, and going into the little kitchen to help with the disposal of the shopping. Part of her mind was sternly chiding: What do you think you are doing, letting just anybody in? Why, I might be a mugger. Another screamed: My mother can't be living here, she can't. Still another was saying: I'm going to blow this place down, I am, it shouldn't be allowed.

Mrs. Wood's flat, and presumably Dorothy Mellings's flat, contained two not very large rooms, with a kitchen just big enough to take a little table, at which Mrs. Wood and Alice sat close to each other, side by side, staring at a dingy yellow wall, drinking tea and eating two biscuits each. Mrs. Wood was on the pension. Working-class. She had a son in Barnet who visited on Sundays. She did not like her daughter-in-law, God forgive her. She had a grandson, aged five.

Dorothy Mellings had no family to visit her at weekends; this thought brushed the surface of Alice's mind, but was rejected with a gust of emotion: if her mother had decided to live in a place like this, then she must have gone mad!

By the time Alice left, she knew to the last inch of cupboard space what her mother, three floors up, would have; and there certainly would not be room for an enormous aluminium saucepan.

Alice stayed a good hour or more, and left with promises to return. She went to the hardware shop and bought the necessary saucepan, thinking that after all there would be many more congresses and meetings at number 43, and if she had to move, the saucepan would go with her.

But she had received a blow; her heart whimpered and hurt her; she had no real home now. There was no place that knew her, could recognise her and take her in.

Suddenly a whole army of recollections invaded her.

Alice was standing in the middle of the pavement, in the rush hour, embracing an aluminium saucepan large enough to cook a small shrub, staring and apparently in a state of shock.

She was remembering her mother's parties. They had gone on all through her childhood and adolescence. After Alice had departed to university, seldom to return home, they had gone on still; she would hear about them from someone, probably Theresa. "One of your mother's parties, you know - it was marvellous." They always happened the same way. Her mother would remark, with a restless, harassed look, "It's time we had a party; oh no, I can't face it." Then she would start, asking this person and that, for a date a month ahead. Her reluctance towards the party vanished, and she began to shine with energy. She asked Cedric's political colleagues, all the people working in C. Mellings, Printers and Stationers, the i

When there were parties, when there were people in the house, it seemed Alice became invisible to her mother, and had no place in her own home.

People always stayed the night after the parties: drunks, or those who didn't want to drink and drive, or some who had come from other towns. And then Dorothy would say to Alice, casually, in the full ringing confident voice that went with being so successfully in control of this great gathering of people which had made the whole house - not to mention the street - explode with noise and music for hours and hours, "Alice, you'll just have to give up your room. Can you go down the road and sleep with A

Alice always protested, complained, sulked, made a scene - manifestations that of course scarcely got noticed, so many other things were going on by that stage of the party: women guests in the kitchen washing up, intimate conversations between couples up and down the stairs, the last tipsy dancers circling around the hall. Who could possibly have time to care that Alice was sulking again? Sleeping in her parent's bedroom made her violently emotional, and she could not cope with it.

Four in the morning, and she was in her sleeping bag on a foam-rubber pad along the wall under the window. Cedric Mellings, in his dashing pyjamas, dark red, dark blue, was drunk or tight; at any rate expansive. He loved his wife's parties and was proud of her. He always did the drinks, hired the glasses - coped with all that. Dorothy Mellings wore one of the beautiful things she used for sleeping in, a "Mother Hubbard" perhaps, or a kimono, or a kanga from Kenya wrapped around her in one of i

He would put his arm round her, she snuggled up - a glance, a quick reminder from one or the other that Alice was in the room - some sleepy kisses, and they would be off, asleep. But Alice was not asleep. She lay there tense, in the - at last - silent house, in that room which was far from silent because... how much noise two sleeping people did make! It was not just their breathing, deep and unpredictable, coming regularly, then changing on a gulp, or a snort. Cedric tended to snore, but, apparently becoming aware of this himself, would turn over on his side, and thereafter sleep more becomingly. Not silently, though.

That breathing of theirs going on up there in the dark, she could not stop listening, for it seemed that something was being said that she ought to be understanding - but she could not quite reach it, grasp it. The two different breathings, in and out, in and out, went on and went on, had to go on - yet could stop unpredictably for what seemed like minutes; though of course Alice knew that was nonsense, it was only because she was straining her ears with such fury of concentration that time slowed down. While one of them, Dorothy or Cedric, was in lull of breath, the other went on breathing, in and out, keeping life going, and the silent one took a breath and came back into the dialogue that seemed to be going on between them. A conversation, that was what it seemed like to the child listening there, as if her parents talked to each other still, not in words now, but in a language Alice did not know. In and out, in and out, with many little halts and hesitations and changes of pitch, they might have been questioning each other - and then (and Alice waited for it) the stage where the breathing became regular, deep and far off, further away every minute.