Doris Lessing

Alice was disappointed that she must stay in an orderly part of the crowd, but never mind, another time.

Bert said he was going to bed. At once Jasper got up and said he was, too. Alice understood he did not want to be alone with her, though she knew he was happy enough to have her there when Bert was. She went up into the room she had shared with him, next to Bert's. Bert was of course less noisy without Pat; but he was sleeping badly, as she could hear. And tonight, even with the door tight shut, she could hear that Faye was having one of her turns.

"Faye had one of her turns last night," Roberta might say, having forgotten that the old-fashioned phrase - Victorian? - once used humorously by Faye ("I was 'aving one of me turns, me dear") - was meant to be humorous, so that it had become ordinary speech. At the moments when Roberta used it, she acquired a workaday, bygone look, was like a servant or a lower-class person from a play on the box. Theatrical. When were Faye and Roberta themselves? Only when they had been beaten back, down, by some person or situation, into being the people who used those clumsy blurting labouring heavy voices, which made them seem as if they had been taken over by pitiful strangers who could not be expected to know Faye, know Roberta.

Alice slept badly. She woke to hear Reggie and Mary go downstairs; their cheerful voices were loud, as if they were alone in the house and it belonged to them. She heard Roberta and Faye go down, quiet, not talking. It was nine before Bert woke next door; he was lighting cigarettes one after another. She thought, Perhaps we're not going to get to Queen Bitch Thatcher today. And descended to the empty kitchen, determined not to show disappointment. Then Bert did come. At once he went to wake Jasper, who, she could see, would easily call the whole thing off. It was raining steadily.

But they did get out of the house and to the train; and watched London give way to the country through the dirty train windows and grey shrouds of rain. Bert was silent, thinking his thoughts, which - Alice suspected - he would be sharing with Jasper were she not there. Jasper was being polite with her.

At the station they took a bus to the university. The great cold lunatic buildings looked at them through the downpour, and Alice felt murder fill her heart. She knew most of the new universities; had visited them, demonstrated outside them. When she saw one she felt she confronted the visible embodiment of evil, something that wished to crush and diminish her. The enemy. If I could put a bomb under that lot, she was thinking, if I could... Well, one of these days...

They were late. Outside the main entrance about sixty demonstrators huddled under plastic hoods and umbrellas, herded by eighty-odd policemen. At the sight of this, Jasper came to life, and ran forward, jeering, "Fascist pigs, pigs, pigs. Cowards! How many of you do you need for one demonstrator?" Alice ran to catch up with him, so as to be beside him, ready to calm him down. Bert came on slowly behind, walking, not ru

The official cars came sweeping up, and before Alice, Jasper, and Bert could reach the crowd, Mrs. Thatcher had got out, and was being led quickly in. Fruit and - as Alice had hoped - eggs sailed through the air, exploding with a dull squelch. Mrs. Thatcher had gone inside.

The demonstrators began a steady chant of "Nuclear missiles out. Out, out, out. Nuclear missiles out, out, out."

They kept it up bravely. Mrs. Thatcher would be inside for two hours, at least.

The policemen were bored and resentful, forced to stand there in the rain; they were only too ready to be provoked. A girl near Alice picked up a large orange from the ground and flung it at a policeman. His helmet was dislodged. Delighted, two policemen came to her. She dodged about in the crowd for a bit, then they caught her, and she went limp and was dragged to a van, her long brown hair trailing wetly. The two policemen came back to a chorus of boos and jeers. Alice could feel Jasper beside her, pulsating with frustrated excitement. He was longing for a real tussle. So was she. So were the police, who gri

Others, less burdened by circumstance, were throwing fruit and eggs at the police, and were promptly being taken to the vans.

"Fucking police state," shouted Jasper, almost out of control with excitement. He was dodging about in the crowd, as if he were being pursued.

The crowd took it up: "Police state, police state," they yelled.

Alice saw an eye signal pass among the policemen; she knew that they would all be arrested at the slightest provocation. She yearned for it, longed for the moment when she would feel the rough violence of the policemen's hands on her shoulders, would let herself go limp, would be dragged to the van.... But she said to Jasper, "Come on, run," and she grabbed him by the hand and they ran. Bert, standing rather by himself at the edge of the crowd, stepped back as the arrests started. He stood watching. But he, too, would be arrested in a moment. Alice, her blood on fire, her face distorted with excitement, rushed in, darted among the policemen, admiring her own skill in it, grabbed Bert, and said, "Come on." Bert, roused, said, "Oh yes. Yes, Alice, you're right." And followed her.

"Get them," shouted a policeman, as the three sprinted away.

Five or six policemen set off after them, but one slipped in a puddle, rolled over, and slid along in the mud, and when he tried to get up, he fell again. It seemed that he had hurt himself. The others crowded around him. Meanwhile, disappointed that the chase had been so short, the three found their way to the bus stop. It was pouring steadily, a cold hard rain.

Their spirits sank, now that the challenge of the police was taken off them. It had not been very satisfactory. They were all thinking that they had spent a lot of money for very little.

They went into a cafe. The men ate sausages and chips; Alice, a salubrious vegetable soup.

They debated about whether to go back to the university for Mrs. Thatcher's exit to the cars. Alice was for it, though she was afraid of the effect of that pink-and-white, assured, complacent Tory face on Jasper. If he were kept in for the weekend, the weekend ticket return would be invalid, and the fares back on Monday would be double.

But she did feel she hadn't had her money's worth.

They agreed they would go back, to show solidarity with the others - if any demonstrators still remained. But it began to rain even harder. A real tropical deluge, if such cold rain deserved the name "tropical."

They returned to the station and, dispirited, to London. There they went to the pictures, and then, finding Faye and Roberta in the kitchen, they all swapped notes. Clearly, they - Jasper and Alice and Bert - would have done much better to have gone to the anti-professor demo, which had been a great success. About a thousand people, Faye said - Alice automatically corrected this to "six hundred." Mostly women, but quite a lot of men. They had jostled the professor badly, had nearly brought him down, had got him really rattled. "Well, that ought to give him pause for thought, at least," said Roberta happily, thinking of how she had shrieked he was a scummy sexist and in the pay of the fascists.

Even the Thatcher demonstration sounded effective, in retrospect. After all, quite a few had been arrested. Reggie and Mary had - of course! - a television in their room. They all went up, and crowded in, making jokes about the large bed, the tidy furniture, the carpets. They sat on the bed and watched the news. There was no mention of the fascist professor, but there was a brief scene of the demonstrators struggling with the police at the university. The three were disappointed that they did not appear on the screen. The newscaster said that at one point the police were afraid a bomb had been thrown. "It was an orange," screamed Alice, and they all laughed and jeered, and went down for more talk in the kitchen, taking with them four bottles of wine from a case of it that Reggie and Mary had under the dressing table.