Doris Lessing

Here Alice's sound of protest was like a moan, and she stared with frantic eyes at her mother: stop, please stop, before you destroy everything, even the memories of our lovely house.

But this dangerous, destructive force that was now her mother did not hear her, or decided to take no notice, for she was going on, in a hard, cold, but amused voice, as if nothing, but nothing, was to be taken seriously. "And the other reason was, there was this fantastic deal: those Germans - what's their name? You know, you spoke to them - wanted to buy the house as it stood with carpets and curtains - the lot. But I had to get out fast to fit their schedule. And you and Jasper wouldn't get out, no matter what I said." Here Dorothy Mellings put her head back and laughed, while Alice, eyes wide, knuckles of her left hand between her teeth - she would have toothmarks there - sat looking as if she would simply dissolve in front of her mother's eyes in a puddle of tears. "Then Cedric rang Jasper up and said if he didn't get out, the police would be called in. Then, thank God, you left, and I had the estate agent hounding me to get the place ready. The next thing was, as soon as the house was cleaned up, some joker got in and stole every stitch of curtain." She rocked with laughter. It was the kind of laughter she shared with Zoë Devlin, certainly, but it was not being shared with Alice. "Not a bloody curtain left. With the what's-their-names coming in in four days. They were livid. They had contracted for curtains, and curtains they were going to have! The deal was off!" Here Dorothy had another good swallow of Scotch. "I lost the flat I was going into: I had to tell them what had happened. They were nice about it, but they couldn't wait. It was a good flat, but actually I am pleased. It was too big for me. I really need something this size. I wanted to be done with it all."

Hearing, correctly, "I wanted to be done with you," Alice felt her eyes at last fill with tears which ran down her face.

"Some people from Yorkshire took the house, without curtains. For two thousand less, but by then I was past caring. This flat was available. It's fine. The simpler the better. When I think, the years of my life I've spent fussing."

Alice said in a doleful little voice, "I am sorry I took the rug."

"Oh yes, so you did. Well, as it happens, it doesn't matter. I don't have room for it anyway, so you might as well have it."

Alice snuffled and sniffed, and then said, "I am sorry I called you a fascist."

"Wha-a-at?" Dorothy seemed incredulous. "A fascist, did you? Well, well. And what about all the other things. A fascist. Who cares about your naughty little swearwords."

"What did I say? I didn't..." Somewhere at the back of Alice's mind there still reverberated that parting scene when she had screamed abuse at her mother, and so had Jasper. Incandescent, she had been. Molten with rage.

"Are you still with Jasper?" demanded Dorothy.

Another Alice, all rectitude and certainty, banished the snuffling child. "Of course. I am with Jasper. You know that."

"Oh, God, Alice," said Dorothy Mellings, suddenly offering her daughter the simple warm sincerity that was what Alice remembered of her mother, particularly of the last four years in her house, and for which she had been starving. "Oh, God, why don't you get a job? Do something?"

"You seem to have overlooked the fact that we have over three million unemployed," said Alice self-righteously.

"Oh, rubbish. You got a better degree than most of your mates. All my friends' children of your age got jobs and have careers. You could have done, too, if you had wanted. You didn't even try. Well, you could start now - your father could help. Have you seen Cedric?"

"No, I don't want to," said Alice. "I'm not going to live that kind of life. I'm not going to sit in an office nine to five."

Suddenly wild with exasperation, with loss, with incomprehension, Dorothy cried out, "Oh, I did so want something decent for you, Alice. I had no proper education, as you know - God knows I di

This wild loose emotion of her mother's was having the effect of tightening Alice up, making her feel prim and disapproving. Seeing her mother getting tight, at parties or otherwise, was the main reason why Alice never drank. There had always been a point, when Dorothy drank, where some awful malevolence spilled out of her, like a vicious chemical, burning everything it touched. But the destructiveness that once had jetted out of her only when she was drunk, as if from an overpressured container kept in some corner deep inside her, seemed now to have taken her over, so that nothing was safe from her sarcastic hostility: not her children, her friends, her former husband, or anything in her past.

Alice thought, as she watched Dorothy staring with heavy sorrowful eyes into some lost opportunity or other, Well, what does she think she should have been, then?

Dorothy said, "I would have been a good doctor, I know. You know what you would have been good at. I'd have been a good farmer, too. And an explorer."

"An explorer!" jeered Alice feebly, and Dorothy said, "Yes, an explorer." Her glass was empty. She got up, went to the shelf, poured another liberal dose of whisky, sat down. She was not looking at Alice. "I haven't done anything with my life." She was even smiling, contemptuous, as she negated Alice in this way. "I used to look at you when you were little, and I thought, Well, at least I'll make sure that Alice gets educated, she'll be equipped. I won't have Alice stuck in my position, no qualifications for anything. But it turned out that you spend your life exactly as I did. Cooking and na

Alice was hurt beyond speaking, sat in a dwarfed, shrinking position, listening as her mother went on: "This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything."

Alice found she was becoming herself again. "Don't be silly, we can do anything we like."

"Oh, you, ru

"You don't understand, Mother," said Alice, calm and confident. "We are going to pull everything down. All of it. This shitty rubbish we live in. It's all coming down. And then you'll see."

This brought Dorothy back to herself. Her dry watchfulness returned, she set a distance between herself and her daughter; her green eyes again seemed like stones, and she said, "And then you are going to build it all up again in your own image! What a prospect." She laughed. And as Alice began to go red, rising to her feet, "Oh, don't misunderstand me, you probably will. With so many of you around, with only one thought in your minds, how to get power for yourselves..." She was laughing loudly, her half-drunk laugh, which Alice so hated. "Yes, I can see it all. Jasper will probably be Minister of Culture - he's the type for it. He loathes anything decent, and he once wrote a terrible novel he couldn't get published. And you'll be his willing aide."