Doris Lessing

Jasper was saying, "Why? What? I don't know what you mean?"

And Bert, "What did he do?"

Nobody answered. They couldn't be bothered. Comrade Andrew was not worth the effort. Gone. Disappeared.

Jasper said hotly - it came bursting out - "Bert and I went to Ireland. We saw the comrades. They weren't all that interested."

"So I heard," said Jocelin calmly. "Yes, I heard about that. But what of it? Who are the IRA to tell us what to do in our own country?"

This struck them all with the force of some obvious and ineluctable truth that inexplicably had not been seen by them till this moment. Of course! Who were the IRA, to tell them what to do?

Bert laughed softly, and his white teeth showed. Jasper laughed - and Alice suffered on hearing it, for she could measure by it how hurt he had been, how put down, by the refusal in Moscow to take him seriously, after the refusal in Ireland. Jasper's laugh was scornful and proud, and confidence was rushing back into him, and he looked about at them all, justified.

"Right on," said Faye. "At last. As far as I am concerned, you've all just seen the light. We have to decide what to do, and we will carry it out. We don't have to ask permission of foreigners." She was still using her cold, correct voice.

"Absolutely," said Roberta.

"Then that's that," said Alice. "All we have to do now is to make a plan."

At this point, a knock on the front door. Alice went, and came back in with Felicity. It was a question, since Alice was Philip's "next of kin," of her going to the hospital for the formalities.

Felicity did not want to sit down; did not want, as they all saw, to be forced into taking on Philip's affairs.

Alice said angrily, "Why me, Felicity? Why not you?"

"Look," said Felicity. "Philip came to stay in my place because he was stuck. Desperate. As far as I was concerned, he was just someone without a place to live."

"But he must have a family, or someone?"

"He has a sister, somewhere."

"But where?"

"How do I know? He never said."

The two women faced each other, as if in a bitter quarrel. Seeing how they must look, they became apologetic.

Felicity said, "When I said Philip could stay, I thought it was for the weekend, a week. He was with me for over a year."

Alice saw that it was she who was going to have to do it, and she said, bitterly, "Oh, very well." Now she had got her way, Felicity became "nice," and refused a cup of tea with many hurried apologies, and fussed her way out of the house.

"Poor Alice," said Roberta. "I'll come with you." Alice began to cry. They all looked at her in amazement.

"Of course she is crying," said Roberta. "Of course she is. She is tired." She put her arm around Alice and took her to the door. "Don't do anything we wouldn't do when we've gone," she said facetiously to them all, but her eyes were on Faye, who, betrayed, tossed her head and would not look at Roberta; she had suddenly again become a cockney maiden.

The two women were at the hospital for some hours, signing forms, seeing appropriate officials. Alice agreed to get a death certificate. She arranged to go through Philip's possessions with a Council representative, who would come tomorrow.

At midnight, Roberta tucked her up with a cup of hot chocolate, making it clear that that was it: she did not feel obliged to do more for Philip, though she would if Faye were not so needful.

Alice spent the morning over the death certificate and the afternoon going through Philip's possessions, with the official. It was an awful, painful business. Philip owned a few clothes, and about five hundred pounds in the post office, which would go to pay for his funeral.

As for his ladders and equipment, Alice said nothing about them, so they, at least, would not be sold to some dealer for a tenth of their value. They - in number 43 - now at least owned their own ladders, trestles, and tools. For what that was worth; for as long as that was worth anything.

Because of Alice's preoccupation with the disposition of Philip, the household marked time. Rather, all did save Jocelin, who was at work in an upstairs room on a variety of devices that she was concocting out of the books she referred to as "recipe books," which gave admirable and concise advice about making explosive devices. She had purloined some of the materiel on its way through number 45. Alice, with the others, saw these devices, on Jocelin's invitation. They were ranged on one of Philip's trestles in a locked room-locked because of Mary and Reggie, who, though moving out in a few days, were not yet gone. What struck Alice about the things Jocelin had made was that they looked so unimportant and even flimsy, were mere assemblages of bits of this and that. Electronic devices that Jocelin was clearly proud of seemed no more portentous than those fragments of minuscule circuitry that appear when the insides of a transistor radio are broken apart.

There were also paper clips, drawing pins, a couple of cheap watches, bits of wire, household chemicals, copper tubing of various sizes, ball bearings, tin tacks, packets of plastic explosive, old-fashioned dynamite, reels of thick cotton, string.

While Jocelin worked with relish ("enjoyment" was not a word for Jocelin) at these little toys, and Alice wept over Philip - for she felt now as if she had lost an old friend, even a brother - Jasper and Bert went to some demonstrations, admonished by the others on no account to get themselves arrested, for there was important work to be done; and Roberta took Faye to stay with a friend at Brighton, because the sea air would do Faye some good. Roberta's mother was still in a coma.

A day passed slowly. The house seemed empty. Alice found herself thinking that Roberta and Faye probably would be back that night. Would they like to be welcomed by a real meal, even a feast? While she worried about this, sitting in the kitchen with the cat, Caroline came in with carrier bags full of food. She was smooth and sleek with pleasure; she said she felt like cooking a real meal; no, Alice must sit where she was and for once allow herself to be waited on.

Until then only Alice had brought in food. Real food, that is, not a pizza or some portions of chips. Only Alice had trudged in with loads of fruit, of vegetables, had stacked the refrigerator with butter and milk, piled a cupboard with pastas and pulses. Now she sat gratefully watching Caroline, who worked smiling, full of a rich secret contentment that seemed to spill out over her, like candlelight. Alice felt meagre, dry; she did these things, cooked and fed and nurtured, but it was out of having to, a duty. She had never in her life felt what she saw brimming over in Caroline, who, as she licked a spoon to test a sauce, looked at Alice over it as though she were sharing some pleasure with her that only the rare, the initiated, of the world could even suspect. And then she lifted a spoon over to Alice, carefully, guarding - it seemed - some essence or distillation, and watched, her eyes glistening, as Alice tasted and said, "Yes, fantastic, wonderful."

"I am a great cook," sang or purred Caroline. "This is what I ought to be doing...." And, because she was reminded of what she was doing, how employed, a bleakness came over her for a moment, and she was silent.

She told Alice her history. A good daughter of the middle classes, as she described herself, she saw the light - that is, that the System was rotten and needed a radical overthrow - when she was eighteen. She was in love with a young Che Guevara from the LSE, but he turned respectable on her and settled for the Labour Party. Nevertheless, he was the love of her life. When she visited him - "Absolute anguish, my dear, why do I do it?" - she knew that this was the man for her. "But how could I live like that? I couldn't! One weekend is enough. Then we weep, we quarrel, and we part. Until next time." So she chattered, becoming flushed, seeming to loosen and soften from the heat in the kitchen, flour on her cheek, sleeves rolled up, her large white hands in control of everything. She looked plump, soft, content, full of secret and unscrupulous satisfactions.