The Good Terrorist

by Doris Lessing

  Where was her mother, for a start? Did she imagine she could run away from Alice, just like that? Was she mad? Well, she must be, not telling Alice and Jasper … Here somewhere deep in her mind a thought began tugging and nagging, that her mother had told her. Well, if so, not in such a way that Alice could take it in.

  Could she get some money from her mother? Not if she had just moved. With all that expense. Besides, she probably hadn’t got over being angry; she needed time to cool down.

  How about Theresa and Anthony?

  Over this, Alice thought long and intently. Theresa would slip her another fifty pounds, but it wasn’t enough. What was the good of fifty pounds? She had got the forty-odd due to her that week from Social Security, and it had melted away on things Philip needed. She thought that if she went there while the maid was cleaning, Theresa and Anthony out at work, she could nick the netsukes if she was quick and clever, and the maid would not notice. But the thought did not stay with her; affection drove it off. Theresa had been so good to her always, she could not do that to Theresa. Anthony was another matter. If it was only Anthony: she would take anything she could get from him!

  Zoë Devlin? But for some reason Alice would not go on with that thought. She felt sick, as if Zoë had quarrelled so horribly with her, as well as with her mother.

  Perhaps she could actually pick out a suitable house and rob it? Clearly, she was not without talents in that direction. She felt confident that she could succeed.

  But to become a thief, a real thief—that was a step away from herself. How could she describe herself as a revolutionary, a serious person, if she was a thief? Besides, if she was caught, it would be bad for the Cause. No. Besides, she had always been honest, had never stolen anything, not even as a child. She had not gone through that period of nicking things out of her mother’s handbag, her father’s pockets, the way some small children did. Never.

  She could imagine herself choosing a likely house, watching for its inhabitants to be out, gliding into it, getting her hands around valuables—after all, she did know what was valuable and what wasn’t. She wasn’t one of those poor deprived kids who slipped in through an open window or an inadequately locked door and then did not know better than to steal a television or a video. But she could not really see herself with whatever it was: vase or rug or necklace, trying to sell it.

  No, that was out.

  She had to have money. Look at all these people, taking and taking … though Jim had said proudly last night that now he would contribute properly; he would pay his way, Alice needn’t think that he wouldn’t.

  The only place she could think of was her father’s. Not his house: it was too early to try that again. The firm. She sat, eyes shut, visualising the inside of the building that housed C. Mellings, Printers and Stationers. The safe in her father’s office downstairs had cheques in it, but she did not want cheques. Downstairs, in the little stationery shop in the back, which her father had started in a small way as a trial and which had become so successful that sometimes he joked it financed everything else, was a safe full of cash. But only in the daytime, when the shop was full of people. Every night the cash was carried upstairs to the other safe. Next morning it was taken to the bank. How was she to get that money? She did not know the combination of the safe, and did not propose to turn professional with explosives, or whatever they used.

  No, she needed something else; she needed cheek. It was Friday. They did better business downstairs on Friday than on any other day. The shop closed at five, and then the money was taken straight upstairs to be counted. It stayed in the safe until Monday morning. On Friday evening her father often went home early, because he and Jane and the infants liked to drive into Kent, where they had friends. A real, typical, bourgeois arrangement: Cedric and Jane stayed weekends with the Boults; the Boults would use Cedric and Jane’s house for trips into London. Nothing like this had ever happened while Cedric still lived with Dorothy! Of course not. Her mother was too full of mine and thine: you couldn’t see her sharing her house with another family. For some reason, this business of the weekends, the visiting Boults, always made Alice weak with anger.

  But, with luck, her father would have left at three.

  To reach her father’s business, she had to go two stops further on the Underground than for her father’s house, or her mother’s—well, where her mother had been. She walked, deliberately not thinking too much, into the stationer’s, where she was greeted, the boss’s daughter. She walked through the shop, saying she wanted to see her father, then upstairs to the office floor. People were tidying their desks for the weekend. She said Hello, and How are you, and went into her father’s office, where the secretary, Jill, sat in her father’s chair, counting money from the till downstairs.

  “Oh, he’s gone then,” said Alice, and sat down. Jill, counting, leafed through ten-pound notes, smiled, nodded, her mouth moving to indicate that she could not stop. Alice smiled and nodded, and got up to stand at the window, looking out. Indolent and privileged, daughter of the establishment, she leaned on the sill, watching the goings-on in the street, and listened to the sounds of paper sliding on paper.

  Should she say her father had agreed she should have some money? If she did, Jill could not say no; and then, on Monday, her father, on being told, would not give her away, would not say: My daughter is a thief. She was about to say: He said I could have five hundred pounds. But then it happened, the incredible, miraculous luck that she now expected, since it happened so easily and often: in the next office the telephone rang. Jill counted on. The telephone rang and rang. “Oh, flick it,” muttered Jill daintily, for she was the kind of good girl favoured by her father as secretary, and she ran next door to the telephone. Alice saw on the desk that there was a white canvas bag in which stacks of notes had already been put. She slid her hand in, took out a thick wad, then another, put them inside her jacket, and again leaned, her back to the room, at the window. Jill returned, saying that it was Mrs. Mellings, for her father, and it took Alice some moments to realise that this must be her mother, not the new Mrs. Mellings, who at this moment would be already on her way to the pleasures of a weekend in Kent.

  She did not want to ask, Do you know her address?, thus betraying herself; but she asked, idly, “Where was she ringing from?” Jill again did not reply, since she was counting, but at last said, “From home. Well, I suppose so.”

  She was not noticing anything. Alice waited until Jill stood up, with three white canvas bags, notes and cheques and coins separately, and put them into the safe.

  “Oh well, I’ll be off,” Alice said.

  “I’ll tell your father you were here,” said Jill.

  When Alice arrived home, she counted what she had. It was a thousand pounds. At once she thought: I could have taken two thousand, three—it would come to the same thing. In any case, when they know the money has gone, when they remember I was there, they’ll know it was me. Why not be hung for a sheep as for a lamb?

  Well, it would have to do.

  Alice thought for some time about where to put it. She was not going to tell Jasper. At last she zipped open her sleeping bag, slid the two packets of notes into it, and thought that only the nastiest luck would bring anyone to touch it, to find what she had.

  Friday night. Jasper and Bert had been gone for ten days. They had said they would come at the weekend.

  Thinking Pat, where’s Pat?, she went down to the kitchen, and found Pat, with her jacket on, a scarf, and her bright scarlet canvas holdall. She was scribbling a note, but stopped when she saw Alice, with a smile that was both severe and weak, telling Alice that Pat had not wanted to face the business of good-byes, and would now hurry through them.

  “I’m off, Alice,” she said, quickly, hardly allowing her eyes to meet Alice’s.

  “You’re through with Bert?”

  Tears filled Pat’s eyes. She turned away. “Some time I’ve got to break it. I’ve got to.”

  “Well, it’s not for
any outsider to say,” remarked Alice. Her heart was sick with loss, surprising her. It seemed she had become fond of Pat.

  “I’ve got to, Alice. Please understand. It’s not Bert. I mean, I love him. But it’s the politics.”

  “You mean, you don’t agree with our line about the IRA?”

  “No, no, not that. I don’t have any confidence in Bert.”

  At least, she did not say, as well, “in Jasper.”

  She said, “Here is my address. I’m not fading out. I mean, I don’t want to make any dramatic breaks, that kind of thing. I’ll be working in my own way—the same sort of thing, but what I see as rather more … serious.”

  “Serious,” said Alice.

  “Yes,” she insisted. “Serious, Alice. I don’t see this tripping over to Ireland, on the word of somebody called Jack.” She sounded disgusted and fed up, and the word “Jack” was blown away like fluff. “It’s all so damned amateur. I don’t go along with it.”

  “I thought you’d be off.”

  Pat swiftly turned away. It was because she was crying.

  “We’ve been together a long time.…” Her voice went thick and inarticulate.

  “Never mind,” said Alice dolefully.

  “I do mind. And I mind about leaving you, Alice.”

  The two women embraced, weeping.

  “I’ll be back,” said Pat. “You were talking about a CCU Congress. I’ll be back for that. And for all I know, I won’t be able to stand breaking with Bert. I did try once before.”

  She went out, running, to leave her emotion behind.

  The two men came back on Sunday night. Alice knew at once they had failed. Jasper had a limp look, and Bert was morose even before he read the letter Pat had left for him.

  She made supper for Jasper, who at once went up to his sleeping bag on the top floor. Bert said he was tired, but she followed him, and found him standing alone in the room he had shared with Pat. She went in and, though he was not thinking of Ireland, said, “I want to ask some questions. Jasper’s sometimes funny when he has had a disappointment.”

  “So am I,” said Bert, but softened and, standing where he was, hands dangling down, said, “We didn’t get anywhere.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  She was thinking that rejection brought out the best in Bert. Without his easy affability, the constant gleam of his white teeth amid red lips and dark beard, he seemed sober and responsible.

  He shook his head, said, “How do I know? We were simply told no.”

  She was not going to leave until he told her everything, and at last he did go on, while she listened carefully, to make a picture for herself that she could trust.

  “Jack,” in Dublin, had been to bars and meeting places, had made enquiries, had met this man and then that, reporting back to Bert and Jasper that things were going on as they should. Then Bert and Jasper—but not Jack, a fact that had to give her food for thought—met a certain comrade in a certain private house in a suburb. There they had been questioned for a long time, in a way that—Alice could see, watching Bert’s face as he recited the tale-had not just impressed but sobered the two. Frightened them, judged Alice, pleased this had been so, for she did feel that Jasper was sometimes a bit too casual about things.

  Towards the end of this encounter, or interview, a second man had come in, and sat without saying a word, listening. Bert said with a short laugh and a shake of the head, “He was a bit of a character, that one. Wouldn’t like to get across him.”

  At last, the man who had done all the talking said that while he, speaking for the IRA, was grateful for the support offered, they—Bert and Jasper—must realise that the IRA did not operate like an ordinary political organisation, and recruitment was done very carefully, and to specific requirements.

  Jasper had cut in to say that of course he understood this: “Everyone did.”

  Then the comrade had repeated, word for word, what he had just said. He went on to say that it was helpful to the Republican cause to have allies and supporters in the oppressing country itself, and that Jasper, Bert, “and your friends” could play a useful part, changing public opinion, providing information. They could be supplied, for instance, with pamphlets and leaflets.

  Jasper had apparently become excited and expostulatory, and made a long speech about fascist imperialism. To this speech both men, the talking man and the silent one, listened without comment, and without expression.

  Then the silent man simply walked out of the room, with a nod and a smile. The smile apparently had impressed Bert and Jasper. “He did smile, in the end,” Bert repeated, with the ruefulness that was the note, or tone, of his account. You could even say that Bert was embarrassed. For him and for Jasper? For Jasper? Alice hoped it was not on account of Jasper, though, clearly, to make that emotional speech had not been too clever.

  Alice would have liked to go on, but Bert said, “Look, I’ve had enough for today. This business with Pat …”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alice. “And I know she is.”

  “Thanks,” he said, dryly, “oh, thanks!,” and began stripping off his jersey, as though she were already gone.

  Alice decided to sleep in the sitting room again, because to choose herself a room would be a final separation. Just as she was settling in, Jim appeared. He had spent the weekend jubilantly with friends. These were friends not seen for a long time, visited now because there was something to celebrate. She saw that already, after only three days, there was an alertness and competence coming into Jim; he had been dulled and slowed by unemployment. Well—of course!—everyone knew that, but to see the results so soon …

  Delighted about Jim, apprehensive for Jasper, Alice lay for a long time awake in the silent room. On this side of the house the traffic from the main road could not be heard.

  She knew that neither Jasper nor Bert would be up early, but made herself get up in time to join Jim for tea and cornflakes. She thought she was rather like a mother, making sure a child had eaten before going off to school, and did not scruple to say, “Are you sure you’ve had enough? There’s no canteen there, you know. You’d better take some sandwiches.” And he, like a son with an indulged mother, “Don’t worry, Alice. I’m all right.” Then in came Philip, and the question of the new water tank was discussed. Rather, a good second-hand one. Did Alice have any idea what a new one would cost? No, but she could guess! Philip would go this morning to his source for such things, talk it over; if one was available, did she want him to buy it, and if so, did she have the money? She empowered him to get the tank, the section of drainpipe, the guttering. Quickly in and out of the sitting room, she slid three hundred pounds from out of her sleeping bag, not wanting Philip to know how much was there—but only because she did not want anyone to know. A disconcerting, even shameful thought had taken possession. It was that when this final list of necessities had been bought, she should put some money into the post office. For herself. Money no one should know about. She should have, surely, a little put away? Yes, she would open a new post-office account, and not tell Jasper.

  Philip and Jim were out. Roberta and Faye were asleep or at their women’s place. Mary and Reggie had gone away for a long weekend, and would not be back until evening. Bert and Jasper slept, or were very silent, in their respective rooms. Alice sat on at the end of the table, in the quiet kitchen. The cat, absent for days, reappeared on the window sill, was let in, accepted cornflakes and milk, carefully licked up every little smear from the dish, miaowed, and went away again.

  Alice was full of woe. This business of the IRA had been Jasper’s impetus for months. Long before the dramatic exit from her mother’s, it had been the IRA … the IRA … every day. She had not at first taken it seriously. But then had had to. Now all that had collapsed. Distributing pamphlets and leaflets was not going to satisfy Jasper. Nor, she was sure, Bert, whom she had seen yesterday for the first time as a potentially responsible comrade. Never once had it crossed Jasper’s or Bert’s mind that they
might be refused. Would not be found good enough. The IRA had not taken Jasper and Bert seriously? Making herself examine this thought, slowly and properly turning it around in her mind, re-creating the scene she could see so vividly of Jasper and Bert with the two IRA, she had to admit that Jasper and Bert had made a bad impression. Well, it could happen! It did happen, with Jasper, all the time.

  Another possibility was that they, Jasper and Bert and the others—herself included—would be tested. Yes, that could be it. An eye would be kept on them, without their knowing. (Comrade Andrew here appeared powerfully before Alice, and she smiled at the image.) But certainly Jasper and Bert had not thought this; and the Irish comrades had not given them anything specific to do.

  This meant—Alice faced it—a bad few days with Jasper. She would not be seeing much of him. He would be gone from here, perhaps returning briefly at night for some food, then off again. Once, in a very bad patch, Jasper had been like that for weeks, over a month, and she had lived in terror for the knock of the police at the door, and news about Jasper she had been dreading since she had first met him. When he was like that, he was not careful about much.

  The only hope was his link with Bert. Steadying. Bert might save the situation without ever knowing that one existed.

  A couple of hours passed, her spirits sinking lower, and then Philip came in, pleased, to say that his chum at the yard, with contacts where demolition work was going on, had all that 43 needed, and it was in a van outside. But Philip had spent the three hundred pounds and needed money to pay for delivery. Just as he was saying all this, while he and she crossed the hall, Jasper appeared, running lightly down the stairs. Alice stood still to watch him, her heart lifting. She always forgot, when she had not seen him for some time, how he affected her. That lightness of his—each step as though he might take off altogether!—and then how he stood there, at the foot of the stairs, straight and slender; you’d think he was from another world, he was so pale and fine, with his glistening cropped hair.… But he was scowling most horribly. Under his gaze she had to go to the sitting room where she had slept, while he knew why she went and knelt by the sleeping bag, which was only just out of his line of sight. She was risking that he might come in; and she had the disconnected, breathless, out-of-control feeling that was fatal with Jasper. He would realise she had come here for money. What was she to do? She quickly thrust what remained of the one package, together with the fat whole package, down her shirt, where it was visible. She put on a jacket, though he would know why she had the jacket on, and went out under his cold, furious, dissecting gaze. Bert had appeared on the stairs, looking tired and demoralised. What a contrast, Jasper and Bert: one like an avenging angel—the thought came compulsively into her mind—the other so brought down and weakened.