Doris Lessing

Five dead. Another one, a girl of fifteen, seemed likely to die. Over twenty injured.

The midnight news devoted more than five minutes to the story.

Alice slept, sitting at the table, head on her arms.

She woke at about six, to see Roberta, shaky, sick, and awful, making herself tea.

Roberta said she would pack her things and be off. She would go to see her mother. She should have gone before, of course, but Faye... Her voice shook, she bit her lips, controlled herself, and drank her tea. She went upstairs to pack, came down with various addresses where Alice could reach her, pencilled neatly on a slip of paper. At least Roberta was not floating out of her life forever.

Roberta, unlike the others, owned a lot of things. She would abandon the actual furniture, but keep curtains, hangings, coverlets, pillows, mirrors, blankets. These were made into two great bundles, and she took them away in a taxi to the station.

Alice listened to the 8:00 a.m. news.

The IRA (in Ireland) said they had had nothing to do with yesterday's bombing, and they would kneecap those who committed such acts in their name. They did not - said the IRA (in Ireland) - go in for murdering i

Well, thought Alice, fancy that. And actually giggled. At the ludicrousness of it.

Well, it didn't matter what the IRA said; it was not for them to decide what comrades in this country did.

Alice sat wondering if it was worthwhile making a trip over to Ireland so as to explain to the Irish comrades the English comrades' point of view?

This speculation was stopped by Jocelin's coming down, with a backpack and a suitcase. She, too, drank tea, and heard that Roberta had departed without commenting, or even asking whether Roberta had asked her to keep in touch. She did not mention Bert and Jasper. About Caroline, Jocelin said that she was a good comrade but did not understand that sacrifices had to be made. She said this standing - she had not sat down - holding a mug of tea between both her hands, staring over it with red-rimmed eyes. Alice thought that she might very well have been crying.

Jocelin departed, and Alice was alone in the house.

She listened to the news again, and thought she would go out and get the newspapers. No, she would buy them when she went out to have lunch with Peter Cecil. Peter Cecil! The poor Russians, they didn't have enough sense not to choose such an obvious name. It was almost like a joke, as if they were sending themselves up. (Here, deep inside Alice, there stirred a little uneasiness, a doubt, but she could not pin it down to anything, so suppressed it.)

It was too early to leave for the restaurant.

She sat on quietly there by herself in the silent house. In the betrayed house... She allowed her mind to move from room to room in it, praising her achievements, as if someone else had accomplished all that, but the work had not been properly acknowledged, and so she was doing it as something due to justice. The house might have been a wounded animal whose many hurts she had one by one cleaned and bandaged, and now it was well, and whole, and she was stroking it, pleased with it and herself.... Not quite whole, however; but she wasn't going to think about what went on in the rafters. Poor house, she thought, full of tenderness, I hope someone is going to love it one day and look after it. When I leave here... It was silly to stay here, Jasper was right, but she would not leave yet, she would stay on a little longer: she felt that she could pull the walls of this house, her house, around her like a blanket, where she could snuggle, where she could feel safe.

She really did feel very peculiar, not herself at all! Well, that was only natural. She needed to go for a good long walk, or perhaps drop over for a little chat with Joan Robbins? No, there'd only be a lot of silly talk about the IRA and the bombing. Ordinary people simply didn't understand, and it was no good expecting them to.... Here the tenderness that had been washing around the place, inside and outside her, not knowing where it belonged, fastened itself on these ordinary people, and Alice sat with tears in her eyes, thinking, "Poor things, poor things, they simply don't understand!" - as if she had her arms around all the poor silly ordinary people in the world.

Now she began to think, but very carefully, about her parents. First, her father: no, he was too awful to waste time on, she wasn't ever going to think about him again. Her mother... What would Dorothy say if she knew her daughter had been at the bombing? Not that Alice believed that she - Alice - had any real reason to feel bad; she hadn't really been part of it. Alice sighed, a long shuddery breath, like a small child. This was something she could never, ever tell Dorothy, and knowing this made her feel severed from her mother as she had not done before: she might have said a final good-bye to her, instead of just having had one of their silly quarrels!

Oh no, it was all too much, it was too difficult.... Here Alice got abruptly to her feet: it looked as if she was about to walk right out of the kitchen, and after that the house; but, having stood in a stiff, arrested pose for a minute or so, she sat down again, because she had remembered Peter Cecil. (Peter Cecil, ha ha!) She couldn't go now, because there was this lunch. But perhaps I'll tell him all about it, she thought, he's a professional, I can talk about the bombing without all the rights and wrongs of everything coming into it, just as a job that was done, but was bungled a bit.... Fu

And Peter Cecil? For some reason, he was different. Of course, I wouldn't give away any names, she thought: I'd just talk very carefully, tell him the story. I'd say I was told by someone in the know, and I wanted to have his opinion.

Here various little warnings that her nerves had registered and were holding banked there till she could attend to them nearly surfaced, but retreated again. Meanwhile, she was thinking that Peter Cecil had a nice face. Yes. (She was looking at him in her mind's eye, as he had stood there yesterday outside the door, she in a frenzy of impatience to be off.) A kind face. Not like those Russians, not at all like them, he was quite different.... And here the warnings came back, in a rush, screaming for attention, and she could no longer shut them out.

Of course Peter Cecil was not like those Russians, because he wasn't a Russian. He was... he was MI-6 or MI-5 or XYZ or one of those bloody things, it didn't matter. The point was, he was English, English.

At this thought, at the word, a soft sweet relief began to run through Alice, so strongly she had to recognise it and be embarrassed by it. And what of it! English or not, he was the enemy, he was - worse than the Russians - he was upper-class (Cecil, I ask you!), he was reactionary, he was a fascist. Well, not exactly a fascist, really, that was exaggerating. But English. One of us. She sat thinking about his Englishness, and what that meant, what she felt about it - that talking to him would be a very different thing from talking to those Russians, who simply got everything wrong, and that was because they didn't know what we were really like: English. And what was the matter with feeling like this? Had they (the comrades) not decided to have no dealings with Russians, IRA Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, only with us?