The Good Terrorist

by Doris Lessing

  Philip said cheerfully to the two men, “Could you give me a hand?” Jasper did not move. Bert did not move.

  Ashamed for them, Alice said, “I’ll come,” and ran out with Philip. The driver, Philip, and she wrestled with the tank. It was heavy, and large—“The size of a small skip!” she joked—but they got it out of the van and up the path and into the house. There the driver said his responsibility ended. Philip ran out to fetch the guttering and the pipe and came in again. Bert and Jasper were in the kitchen, and the door was shut against her. She went straight in and said to them, “For shit’s sake, can’t you help us take the things up the stairs?”

  They had been communicating disapproval, anger behind that closed door. Now Jasper said, “Alice, you’ve gone crazy, do you know that? What do you think you are doing? What is all that junk?” She made herself stand up to him: “The water tank up there is rotten, it’s rusting. Do you want God knows how many gallons of water cascading down all over us?”

  “I don’t care,” said Jasper. “If it does we’ll just move on, as we always do.”

  This cold cruel treachery reached her guts, made her eyes go dark. When she recovered, she was holding on to the edge of the table for balance. She looked at him, ignoring Bert, who was putting on the kettle, cutting bread. “You know you like a decent place, somewhere nice. Of course you do.…”

  “Oh, bullshit,” he said, melodramatic because she was destroying the image he liked to present to Bert. “Well, I’m not having anything to do with it. And what is it costing? What have we spent this time?” His little blue bright eyes, hard and round, which seemed this morning to be protruding out of the shallow creamy lakes around them, were full of hate for her. She knew what she had to expect the moment they were alone.

  She appealed to Bert: “Please help. Philip and I can’t manage. I mean, look at Philip!”

  Slowly, with no change of expression, Bert buttered bread, then sat down. Then, glancing up and seeing her face, unexpectedly got up, as quick and full of energy as he had just been lethargic (but it was the energy of anger) and came out with her into the hall, where Philip, frail as a leaf, was standing by the great dark-grey water tank. Without a word, Bert bent and lifted, leaving Alice and Philip to fit themselves in, and, with him banging and bumping because he was so angry, the white teeth now showing between red lips stretched in a grimace of effort, the tank was raced upstairs, with much damage to the banisters. On the top floor, Bert simply dumped the tank, and ran down again. She and Philip heard the kitchen door slam again, excluding both of them. She looked apologetically at Philip. He was not looking at her. The tank had to go at the end of the little landing. The existing tank was in the attic. There was no way this tank could get through the trap door into the attic. Mystery! How did the first builders think a new tank would get itself up there, when the original tank, presumably put in before the roof went on, reached its natural end? They could only have believed that tanks had eternal lives.

  But the distance from where the tank now sat, blocking the way at the head of the stairs, and where it had to be was too great for them to shift it.

  Alice saw Philip distressed, ashamed, vulnerable.

  “You wait,” she said. She marched down the stairs, and saw Jasper coming out of the sitting room, where, of course, he had been searching for her money. Standing on the bottom step, she said, not knowing she was going to, “I’ve had enough, Jasper. If you can’t help with a little thing like this, when I do so much, then I’m quitting.”

  Just as though he had not been going to walk past into the kitchen, he wheeled, and pounded up the stairs in front of her. When she got there, he was moving the tank with Philip to where it had to go. Here was the other Jasper, quick, intelligent, resourceful. For Philip said that board, thick papers, something, should be put under the tank to raise it, because of some tricky protruding pipes, and Jasper, seeing the stacks of newspaper that had come down from the attic, swiftly gathered them up and built them, while he knelt there beside it, into an eighteen-inch-high platform. Alice could see that though he slid the papers into place so swiftly, he was dealing to one side, as in a card game, newspapers with headlines of interest: “The Jarrow Marchers …” “Hitler Invades …” “The Battle of El Alamein …”

  If the Irish comrades could see him now! thought Alice, watching this deft, swift, accomplished work; and then how he, with Philip and herself, lifted the great tank, as if it weighed nothing, onto the top of the papers.…

  He had not looked at her. She was half fainting with the power of her beating heart. Oh, it was a dangerous thing, to threaten Jasper. Suppose he left her? Oh no, he would not, she knew that absolutely. He could not.

  He ran off down the stairs, without a smile or a look, and she was left again with Philip. Who was distressed. By the atmosphere he had been in, which, she knew, was pure poison.

  She knew he was thinking: If I had not put so much of myself into this house, perhaps I’d leave. Besides, he was upset about Pat’s going.

  She left Philip to his work, thinking that this time she had given him the money for the materials but none for his labour. Almost, she went back up the stairs to give him what she had.… She took a few steps down … almost went back up, hesitated, then—luck being on her side—she did it. She gave him what was left of the already denuded packet—not quite two hundred pounds, it was true, and nothing like what it should be—and went down into the kitchen, whose door she boldly opened, not caring that it had been shut to bar her out.

  Bert had gone.

  Jasper was waiting for her.

  “Where did you get that money?”

  “It’s not your money, so shut up,” she said.

  “You are making us all sick,” he said. “We all think you’ve gone rotten. All you care about is your comfort.”

  “Too bad,” said she, sitting down. In the bright mid-morning light he looked, standing there, rather commonplace and even ugly—so thought Alice, who a few moments before had been melting in a familiar ecstasy of admiration for him.

  He was staring at her midriff. The jacket, hastily put on, was open. At the front, inside the thick cotton shirt, was the flat protuberance of the packet.

  For a moment she feared he would simply step over, grab her wrist, pull out the money. He did not, but went to stand at the window, looking out.

  He said, “You needn’t think I’m just going to give up, that I’m just going to take their word for it!”

  It took a moment for it to penetrate: he was talking about his rejection by the Irish comrades.

  She said companionably, “No, of course not.”

  She believed, and with what a lightening and easing of her poor heart, that now could begin the real, the responsible, discussion she loved so much to have with Jasper. But the door opened and she looked up to see Jim. Who at first she thought was not Jim. The brown glossy skin was ashy and rough, and his eyes stared.

  “What’s wrong, what is wrong?” And she went to him.

  He shook her off. “They gave me the sack.”

  “Oh no,” she said at once, decisively. “Oh no, he couldn’t have.”

  He stood, breathing in, breathing out in a big gasp, breathing in. A loud, painful sound. “They said I stole money.”

  “Oh no,” said Alice. And then again, but differently, “Oh no.”

  Meanwhile Jasper stood taking all this in.

  “What’s the point?” demanded Jim, of the heavens, not of her, and it sounded histrionic, but was not; for the question had behind it his whole life. Then he did look properly at Alice, seeing her, and said, “Well, thanks, Alice, I know you tried. But there’s no point.” And he went stumbling out, crying.

  She went after him. “Wait. You wait. I’m going right over there. I’ll fix it, you’ll see.”

  He shook his head, went into his room, shut the door.

  Alice remained outside, thinking. Jasper appeared from the kitchen. He was grinning complicity, even congratulation. The who
le truth of course he had not sussed out, for who could possibly imagine that luck of hers, which had caused the telephone to ring at precisely the right moment. But he had grasped, being so quick, the bones of it.

  She said, “I’m going over to my father.”

  “You’d better not go over with that on you,” he said, looking at her middle. He spoke nicely, like a comrade at a tricky moment. Without thinking, as though there were nothing else she could do, she slipped her hand in under her thick shirt. The package of notes had got caught in her jacket waistband and she stood fumbling. Her fingers were sliding over the satiny warmth of her skin, and in a sweet intimate flash of reminder, or of warning, her body (her secret breathing body, which she ignored for nearly all of her time, trying to forget it) came to life and spoke to her. Her fingers were tingling with the warm smoothness, and she stood there looking puzzled or undecided, the packet of notes loose in her hand. She looked as if she were trying to remember something. Jasper neatly took the packet from her, and it disappeared into the heart pocket of his bomber jacket.

  “I’m going to my father’s,” she said again, slowly, still puzzling over that message from her buried self, which sang in her fingertips and up her arm.

  She went slowly down the path to the gate, turned into the main road for the Underground, still dreamwalking, still caught in a web of intimations, reminders, promptings. She even put her seduced fingers to her nose and sniffed them, seeming even more puzzled and dismayed. She understood she was standing on the pavement with people walking past, the traffic rushing up and down—had been standing there, stock-still, for how long? She could not help glancing back at number 43, in case Jasper was spying on her. He was. She caught a glimpse of his paleness at the window of the bathroom on the first floor. But he at once disappeared.

  Her energies came back at her in a rush, with the thought that now, having all that money, Jasper would be off somewhere, and if she wanted to catch him, she must hurry.

  At C. Mellings, Printers and Stationers, she went straight through the shop and upstairs, and into her father’s room. He sat behind his big desk, and Jill the secretary sat at her table opposite him across the room. Alice stood in front of her father and said, “Why did you sack Jim? Why did you? That was a shitty bloody fascist thing to do. It was only because he was black, that’s all.”

  Cedric Mellings, on seeing his daughter, had gone red, had gone pale. Now he sat forward, weight on his forearms, hands clenched.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “What? Because you sacked Jim, how dare you do it? It was unfair!” And Alice kicked the front of the desk, hard, several times.

  “I gave Jim Mackenzie a job, because it has always been our policy to employ blacks, Indians, anyone. We have always operated a nonracial policy here. As you know very well. But I should have known better than to accept anyone recommended by you.”

  His voice was now low and bitter, and he looked ill. “Just go away, Alice. Just get out, will you, I’ve had all I can take of you.”

  “Will you listen,” she shrieked. “Jim didn’t take that money. I took it. How can you be so stupid?” This last she addressed to Jill. “I was in this office, wasn’t I? Are you blind or stupid or something?”

  Jill stood up, and papers, biros, went flying. She stared, as pale as her employer, and dumb.

  “Don’t speak to Jill like that,” said Cedric Mellings. “How dare you just come in here and … What do you mean, you took the money, how could you …” Here he put his head into his hands and groaned.

  Jill made a sick sort of noise and went out to the lavatory.

  Alice sat down in the chair opposite her father’s and waited for him to recover.

  “You took that money?” he asked at last.

  “Well, of course I took it. I was here, wasn’t I? Didn’t Jill tell you?”

  “It didn’t cross my mind. And it didn’t hers. Why should it?”

  Now he sat back, eyes closed, trying to pull himself together. His hands trembled, lying on the desk.

  Seeing this, Alice felt a little spurt of triumph, then pity. She was glad of this opportunity to look at him unobserved.

  She had always thought of her father as attractive, even handsome, though she knew not everyone did. Her mother, for instance, had been wont to call him “Sandman” in critical moods.

  Cedric was a solid, tending-to-fat man, pale of skin, lightly freckled, with short fair hair that looked reddish in some lights. His eyes were blue. Alice was really rather proud of his story, his career.

  Cedric Mellings was the youngest of several children. The family came from near Newcastle. There were Scottish connections. Cedric’s grandfather was a clergyman. His father was a journalist and far from rich. All the children had had to work hard to become educated, and launched. Cedric had been just too young for the war, and for this he had never forgiven Fate.

  Unlike his brothers, he did not seem able to get himself together; wasted his time at university, married very young, came to London, did this job and that; wrote a book that was noticed but made no money, then another, a jaunty and irreverent account of a journalist’s career in the provinces. This was based on his father’s life, and it did well enough to bring in five thousand pounds, a lot of money in the mid-fifties. He saw—Dorothy advising and supporting him—that this was a chance that might not recur. He bought a small printing firm that had gone bankrupt, and because of contacts in the Labour Party and all kinds of left-wing political groups, soon had a bread-and-butter basis of pamphlets, brochures, tracts, leaflets, and then a couple of small newspapers. The firm flourished with the good times of the sixties, and Cedric started the stationer’s as a speculation, but it at once did well. The family thankfully left the small shabby flat in Stockwell, and bought a comfortable house in Hampstead. Good times! That was what they all remembered of the sixties, the golden age when everything came so easily. Times of easy friendships, jobs, opportunities, money; people dropping in and out, long family meals around an enormous table in the big kitchen, achievements at school, parties, holidays all over the Continent.

  Cedric Mellings had an affair or two, and then so did Dorothy Mellings. Shocks, storms, rages, accusations; long family discussions, the children much involved, things patched up and smoothed over, the family united. But by then the children were growing, growing up, grown, going, going, gone—Alice up north, back to her father’s territory, though at first she did not see this.

  Cedric Mellings and Dorothy Mellings were alone in the too-large house. Which did not cease to be full of visitors coming and going, eating and drinking. Cedric fell in love with Jane. He went off to live with her. Dorothy remained in the large house.

  All gone. Blown away, and gone, the good times, the easy jobs, even, it seemed, the accomplishment, the friends, affection, money.

  Cedric and Dorothy had seemed a centre, even an essential one; so many well-known people had been in and out with their politics, books, causes, marches for this and that, demonstrations. There had seemed to be a shine or gloss on Cedric and Dorothy, an aura or atmosphere about them, of success, of confidence. But then … what had happened to all that? Cedric with Jane was a very different matter! For one thing, a much smaller house, because, after all, C. Mellings, Printers and Stationers, had to support two establishments; Cedric and Jane’s house did not have that elusive but unmistakable atmosphere of ease, of success. Dorothy, left in the bigger house, alone for a time and later with Alice and Jasper, seemed to have fewer friends. Certainly those who came for a meal with Dorothy Mellings—while Alice was there, with Jasper—tended to come in ones or twos, mostly women, perhaps needing Dorothy’s advice, or even to borrow money; divorced friends—so many of the couples that had been to the Mellingses’ in the good days, had split up. Or a couple, who talked a lot about how things had been, and how they weren’t the same now. If Dorothy gave a party, and it was only a small party, it was an effort, and she appeared to be tired of it all, to have for
gotten how, in the sixties and early seventies, parties just happened. They took the house over and sucked in people from everywhere and telephones rang with careless invitations and orders to wine merchants and grocers.

  Whereas, for a time, Cedric Mellings had been the ugly duckling of the family turned swan—for who else of his siblings lived this glittering glamorous life?—now there was a shabby-duckling quality again. Anyway, what had it all amounted to? scorned Alice, triumphantly examining that too-pale, anxious, strained face, with beads of sweat on the forehead: printing fucking garbage for this or that bloody faction in the fascist bloody Labour Party, printing dishwater newspapers for bloody liberals and revisionists, sucking up to shitty politicians on the make and bourgeois trash anyway doomed to be swept into the dustbins of history?

  It had all been rubbish, all of it. What Alice could not forgive herself for was that she had been taken in by it all.… Well, she had had the sense to get out in time, and meet people who could lead her on the right path.…

  At last Cedric Mellings sighed, opened his eyes, and, having thought out his position, leaned forward and, without looking at Alice but keeping his eyes down, said, “Very well, you took the money, if you say so. I am sorry about that young man. Tell him to come back and … I am sure we can make it all right. Now, as for you, Alice. I suppose it will be a surprise to you, you live in such a dreamworld, but that thousand pounds is not a sum that the firm can afford to lose. We are suffering from the recession, too, you know. It is touch and go—we might have to fold. The printing firm, not the stationer’s.” He let out the incredulous, admiring little snort of laughter he usually did when mentioning the stationer’s: “Greeting cards! That’s the thing. And, of course, the sweets and chocolates and all that sort of rubbish.”