This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  Alice knew that the two men would now talk, without concerning themselves with her, and set herself to guard her interests, while she looked out of the bow-window into the garden, where rubbish of all kinds reached to the sills. Sparrows were at work on the piles, scratching and digging. A blackbird sat on a milk carton and looked straight at her. Beyond the birds, she saw a thin cat crouched under a hydrangea in young green leaf and slim coronets of pink and blue that would be flowers. The cat was watching her too, with bright starved eyes.

  Bert reached into a cupboard and took out a thermos flask the size of a bucket; and three mugs.

  ‘Oh, you do have electricity then?’ she asked.

  ‘No. A comrade in the next street fills it for me every morning,’ he said.

  Alice, watching the scene with half her attention, saw how Jasper eyed the flask, and the pouring of the coffee. She knew he was hungry. Because of the row with her mother, and then slamming out of the house, he had not breakfasted. And he had not had time to drink the coffee she had taken up to him. She thought, ‘But that’s Bert’s supply for the day,’ and indicated she wanted only half a cup. Which she was given, exactly as specified.

  Jasper drank down his cup at once, and sat looking at the thermos, wanting more. Bert did not notice.

  ‘The situation has changed,’ Bert began, as if this were a continuation of some meeting. ‘My analysis was incorrect, as it happened. I underestimated the political maturity of the cadres. When I put the question to the vote, half decided against, and they left here at once.’

  Jasper said, ‘Then they would have proved unreliable. Good riddance.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘What was the question?’ inquired Alice. She used her ‘meeting voice’, for she had learned that this was necessary to hold her own. To her, it sounded false and cold, and she was always embarrassed by it; because of the effort it needed, she sounded indifferent, even absentminded. Yet her eyes were steadily and even severely observing the scene in front of her: Bert, looking at her, or rather, at what she had said; Jasper, looking at the thermos. Suddenly he was unable to stop himself, and he reached for the jug. Bert said, ‘Sorry,’ and pushed it towards him.

  ‘You know what the question was,’ said Jasper, sour. ‘I told you. We are going to join the IRA.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Alice, ‘you voted on whether to join the IRA?’ She sounded breathless: Bert took it as fear, and he said, with loud, cold contempt, ‘Shit-scared. They ran like little rabbits.’

  Alice persisted, ‘How was it put to the vote?’

  Bert said, after a pause, ‘That this group should make approaches to the IRA leadership, offering our services as an England-based entity.’

  Alice digested this, looking strained because of the effort it cost her to believe it, and said, ‘But Jasper told me that this house was Communist Centre Union?’

  ‘Correct. This is a CCU squat.’

  ‘But has the leadership of the CCU decided to offer the services of the whole CCU to the IRA? I don’t understand,’ she said fiercely, not at all in her ‘political’ voice, and Bert said, curt and offhand because, as she could see, he was uncomfortable, ‘No.’

  ‘Then how can a branch of the CCU offer it services?’

  Here she observed that Jasper was seeking to engage Bert’s eyes in ‘Take no notice of her’ looks, and she forestalled him. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  Bert admitted, ‘You are correct, in a way. The point was discussed. It was agreed that while approaches could not be made as a group of the CCU, it would be permissible for a group of CCU members to make the approach, as associated individuals.’

  ‘But…’ Alice lost interest. They are at it again, she was thinking. Fudging it. She returned her attention to the rubbish pile a yard beyond the dirty glass. The blackbird had gone. The poor cat was sniffing around the edges of the heap, where flies were crawling.

  She said, ‘What do you do for food here?’

  ‘Take-away.’

  ‘This rubbish is a health hazard. There must be rats.’

  ‘That’s what the police said.’

  ‘Have they been?’

  ‘They were here last night.’

  ‘Oh, I see, that’s why the others left.’

  ‘No,’ said Bert. ‘They left because they got the shits. About the IRA.’

  ‘What did the police say?’

  ‘They gave us four days to leave.’

  ‘Why don’t we go to the Council?’ said Alice, in an irritated wail; and as Jasper said, ‘Oh, there she goes again,’ the door opened and a young woman came in. She had short shiny black hair that had been expertly cut, black quick eyes, red lips, a clear white skin. She was glossy and hard, like a fresh cherry. She looked carefully at Bert, at Jasper, and at Alice, and Alice knew she was being seen.

  ‘I’m Pat,’ she said. ‘Bert told me about you two.’ And then, ‘You are brother and sister?’

  At once Jasper snapped, ‘No, we are not!’

  But Alice liked it when people made the mistake, and she said, ‘People often take us as brother and sister.’

  Pat again examined them. Jasper fidgeted under the look, and turned away, hands in his jacket pockets, as if trying to seem indifferent to an attack.

  They were both fair, with reddish gleams in hair that wanted to go into little curls and wisps. Jasper’s was cut very short; Alice’s was short and chunky and serviceable. She cut it herself. They both had pinkish freckled skin. Jasper’s little blue eyes were in round white shallows, and this gave him an angelic, candid air. He was very thin, and wore skin-tight clothes. Alice was stocky, and she had a pudgy, formless look to her. Sometimes a girl of twelve, even thirteen, before she is lit by pubescence, is as she will be in middle age. A group of women are standing on a platform in the Underground. Middle-aged women, with carrier bags, gossiping. Very short women, surely? No, they are girls, of twelve or so. Forty years of being women will boil through them, and leave them as they are now, heavy and cautious, and anxious to please. Alice could seem like a fattish clumsy girl or, sometimes, about fifty, but never looked her age, which was thirty-six. Now it was a girl who returned Pat’s look with friendly curiosity from small blue-grey eyes set under sandy lashes.

  ‘Well,’ said Pat, strolling to the window to stand by Alice, ‘have you heard that this happy little community is for the chop?’

  She looked much older than Alice, was ten years younger. She offered Alice a cigarette, which was refused, and smoked hers needfully, greedily.

  ‘Yes, and I said, why not negotiate with the Council?’

  ‘I heard you. But they prefer their romantic squalor.’

  ‘Romantic,’ said Alice, disgusted.

  ‘It does go against the grain, negotiating with the Establishment,’ said Bert.

  ‘Do you mean that this commune is breaking up?’ said Jasper suddenly, sounding so like a small boy that Alice glanced quickly to see whether it had been noticed. It had: by Pat, who stood, holding her cigarette to her lips between two fingers and distancing them, then bringing them back, so that she could puff and exhale, puff and exhale. Looking at Jasper. Diagnosis.

  Alice said quickly, her heart full of a familiar soft ache, on Jasper’s account, ‘It doesn’t go against my grain. I’ve done it often.’

  ‘Oh you have, have you?’ said Pat. ‘So have I. Where?’

  ‘In Birmingham. A group of seven of us went to the Council over a scheduled house. We paid gas and electricity and water, and we stayed there thirteen months.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘And in Halifax, I was in a negotiated squat for six months. And when I was in digs in Manchester, that was when I was at the university, there was a house full of students, nearly twenty of us. It started off as a squat, the Council came to terms, and it ended up as a student house.’

  During this the two men listened, proceedings suspended. Jaspar had again filled his mug. Bert indicated to Pat that the thermos was empty, and she sh
ook her head, listening to Alice.

  ‘Why don’t we go to the Council?’ said Alice direct to Pat.

  ‘I would. But I’m leaving anyway.’ Alice saw Bert’s body stiffen, and he sat angry and silent.

  Pat said to Bert, ‘I told you last night, I was leaving.’

  Alice had understood that this was more than political. She saw that a personal relationship was breaking up because of some political thing! Every instinct repudiated this. She thought, involuntarily, What nonsense, letting politics upset a personal relationship! This was not really her belief: she would not have stood by it if challenged. But similar thoughts often did pass through her mind.

  Pat said, to Bert’s half-averted face, ‘What the fuck did you expect? At an ordinary meeting like that – two of them from outside, we didn’t know anything about them. We don’t know anything about the couple who came last week. Jim was in the room and he isn’t even CCU. Suddenly putting forward that resolution.’

  ‘It wasn’t sudden.’

  ‘When we discussed it before we decided to make individual approaches. To discuss it with individuals, carefully.’

  Her voice was full of contempt. She was looking at – presumably – her lover as though he was fit for the dustbin.

  ‘You’ve changed your mind, at any rate,’ said Bert, his red lips shining angrily from his thickets of beard. ‘You agreed that to support the IRA was the logical position for this stage.’

  ‘It is the only correct attitude, Ireland is the fulcrum of the imperialist attack,’ said Jasper.

  ‘I haven’t changed my mind,’ said Pat. ‘But if I am going to work with the IRA or anyone else, then I’m going to know who I am working with.’

  ‘You don’t know us,’ said Alice, with a pang of painful realization; she and Jasper were part of the reason for this couple’s break-up.

  ‘No hard feelings,’ said Pat. ‘Nothing personal. But yes. The first I heard of you was when Bert said he had met Jasper at the CND rally Saturday. And I gather Bert hadn’t even met you.’

  ‘No,’ said Alice.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not the way to do things.’

  ‘I see your point,’ said Alice.

  A silence. The two young women stood at the window, in an aromatic cloud from Pat’s cigarette. The two men were in chairs, in the centre of the room. The rain-like pattering of the drum came from Jim beyond the hall.

  Alice said, ‘How many people are left here now?’

  Pat did not answer and at last Bert said, ‘With you two, seven.’ He added, ‘I don’t know about you, Pat.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said Pat, sharp and cold. But they were looking at each other now, and Alice thought: No, it won’t be easy for them to split up. She said, ‘Well, if it’s seven, then four of us are here now. Five if Pat…Where are the other two? I want to get an agreement that I go to the Council.’

  ‘The lavatories full of cement. The electricity cables torn out. Pipes probably rotten,’ said Bert on a fine rising derisive note.

  ‘It’s not difficult to put it right,’ said Alice. ‘We did it in Birmingham. The Council smashed the place to a ruin. They pulled the lavatories completely out there. All the pipes. Filled the bath with cement. Piled rubbish in all the rooms. We got it clean.’

  ‘Who is going to pay for it?’ That was Bert.

  ‘We are.’

  ‘Out of what?’

  ‘Oh, belt up,’ said Pat, ‘it costs us more in take-away and running around cadging baths and showers than it would to pay electricity and gas.’

  ‘It’s a point,’ said Bert.

  ‘And it would keep Old Bill off our backs,’ said Alice.

  Silence. She knew that some people – and she suspected Bert, though not Pat, of this – would be sorry to hear it. They enjoyed encounters with the police.

  Bert said unexpectedly, ‘Well, if we are going to build up our organization we aren’t going to need attention from Old Bill.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Pat. ‘As I’ve been saying.’

  Silence again. Alice saw it was up to her. She said, ‘One problem. In this borough they need someone to guarantee the electricity and gas. Who is in work?’

  ‘Three of the comrades who left last night were.’

  ‘Comrades!’ said Bert. ‘Opportunistic shits.’

  ‘They are very good honest communists,’ said Pat. ‘They happen not to want to work with the IRA.’

  Bert began to heave with silent theatrical laughter, and Jasper joined him.

  ‘So we are all on Social Security,’ said Alice.

  ‘So no point in going to the Council,’ said Bert.

  Alice hesitated and said painfully, ‘I could ask my mother…’

  At this Jasper exploded in raucous laughter and jeers, his face scarlet. ‘Her mother, bourgeois pigs…’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Alice. ‘We were living with my mother for four years,’ she explained in a fine breathless, balanced voice, which seemed to her unkindly cold and hostile. ‘Four years. Bourgeois or not.’

  ‘Take the rich middle class for what you can get,’ said Jasper. ‘Get everything out of them you can. That’s my line.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Alice. ‘I agree. But she did keep us for four years.’ Then, capitulating, ‘Well, why shouldn’t she? She is my mother.’ This last was said in a trembling painful little voice.

  ‘Right,’ said Pat, examining her curiously. ‘Well, no point in asking mine. Haven’t seen her for years.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Bert, suddenly getting up from the chair and standing in front of Pat, a challenge, his black eyes full on her. ‘So you’re not leaving after all?’

  ‘We’ve got to discuss it, Bert,’ she said, hurriedly, and walked over to him, and looked up into his face. He put his arm around her and they went out.

  Alice surveyed the room. Skilfully. A family sitting-room, it had been. Comfortable. The paint was not too bad, the chairs and a sofa probably stood where they had then. There was a fireplace, not even plastered over.

  ‘Are you going to ask your mother? I mean, to be a guarantor?’ Jasper sounded forlorn. ‘And who’s going to pay for getting it all straight?’

  ‘I’ll ask the others if they’ll contribute.’

  ‘And if they won’t?’ he said, knowingly, sharing expertise with her, a friendly moment.

  ‘Some won’t, we know that,’ she said, ‘but we’ll manage. We always do, don’t we?’

  But this was too direct an appeal to intimacy. At once he backed away into criticism. ‘And who’s going to do all the work?’

  As he had been saying now for fourteen, fifteen years.

  In the house in Manchester she shared with four other students she had been housemother, doing the cooking and shopping, housekeeping. She loved it. She got an adequate degree, but did not even try for a job. She was still in the house when the next batch of students arrived, and she stayed to look after them. That was how Jasper found her, coming in one evening for supper. He was not a student, had graduated poorly, had failed to find a job after half-hearted efforts. He stayed on in the house, not formally living there, but as Alice’s ‘guest’. After all, it was only because of Alice’s efforts that the place had become a student house: it had been a squat. And Jasper did not leave. She knew he had become dependent on her. But then and since he had complained she was nothing but a servant, wasting her life on other people. As they moved from squat to squat, commune to commune, this pattern remained: she looked after him and he complained that other people exploited her.

  At her mother’s he had said the same. ‘She’s just exploiting you,’ he said. ‘Cooking and shopping. Why do you do it?’

  ‘We’ve got four days,’ said Alice. ‘I’m going to get moving.’ She did not look at him, but walked steadily past him, and into the hall. She carried her backpack into the room where Jim was drumming and said, ‘Keep an eye on this for me, comrade.’ He nodded. She said, ‘If I get permission from the Council for us to live here,
will you share expenses?’

  His hands fell from the drums. His friendly round face fell into lines of woe and he said, ‘They say I can’t stay here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh shit, man, I’m not into politics. I just want to live.’ Now he said, incredulously, ‘I was here first. Before any of you. This was my place. I found it. I said to everyone, Yes, come in, come in, man, this is Liberty Hall.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ said Alice, at once.

  ‘I’ve been here eight months, eight months, Old Bill never knew, no one knew. I’ve been keeping my nose clean and minding my own business, and suddenly…’ He was weeping. Bright tears bounced off his black cheeks and splashed on the big drum. He wiped them off with the side of his palm.

  ‘Well,’ said Alice, ‘you just stay put and I’ll get it on the agenda.’

  She was thinking as she left the house: All those buckets of shit up there, I suppose Jim filled them, nearly all. She thought: If I don’t pee I’ll…She could not have brought herself to go up and use one of those buckets. She walked to the Underground, took a train to a station with proper lavatories, used them, washed her face and brushed her hair, then went on to her mother’s stop, where she stood in line for a telephone booth.

  Three hours after she left home screaming abuse at her mother, she dialled her number.

  Her mother’s voice. Flat. At the sound of it affection filled Alice, and she thought, I’ll ask if she wants me to do some shopping for her on the way.

  ‘Hello, Mum, this is Alice.’

  Silence.

  ‘It’s Alice.’

  A pause. ‘What do you want?’ The flat voice, toneless.

  Alice, all warm need to overcome obstacles on behalf of everyone, said, ‘Mum, I want to talk to you. You see, there’s this house. I could get the Council to let us stay on a controlled squat basis, you know, like Manchester? But we need someone to guarantee the electricity and gas.’