The Good Terrorist

by Doris Lessing

  Meanwhile, four comrades had arrived from Birmingham: two men, two women who, as a matter of course, spent a day with the pickets, and a night in jail. Because every penny brought with them had gone on fines, they were unable to contribute to the weekend’s expenses. Two more comrades would come on Friday night from Liverpool—they had jobs and could not arrive earlier. There would be six more from Birmingham, also on Friday, also in work. Four people from Halifax thinking of starting a branch would come on Friday.

  All the thirty-odd London members would arrive on Saturday morning, and would sleep where they could, in either 43 or 45, on Saturday night.

  Alice was evolving her soup. But she needed, and did not want to buy, an extra-large saucepan. Her mother had such a saucepan. Leaving her assistants chopping vegetables and soaking lentils, she took the Underground, and then walked until she found herself standing in front of the “For Sale” sign. She had forgotten her mother had moved. This made her impatient and angry; she was again angry with her mother. The new address was competently filed away in her mind. It brought with it a feeling of shame, of regret. Not a very nice area; it could just—Alice supposed—be called Hampstead, by someone charitable. Soon she was standing outside a four-storey block of flats, with a small dirty garden in front. Surely her mother was not living here? Yes, her name was on a scrap of paper inserted in a slot opposite number 8: Mellings. An entry phone. Alice was in the grip of an inexplicable panic, could not make herself ring it. But an old woman was standing next to her, putting a key in the door. “Excuse me,” Alice improvised, “I’m looking for a Mrs. Forrester. Number two.”

  “You wouldn’t find a Mrs. Forrester in number two, love. I’m number two. And I am Mrs. Wood.”

  “That’s funny,” said Alice, all bright and chatty, every granny’s dream. “Do you know if there’s a Mrs. Forrester in this building at all?”

  “No, I am sure not, no Forresters here,” and the old girl laughed at her joke. Alice laughed. Then, as Alice had prayed she would, she said, “I’m going to put the kettle on. Would you like a cup of tea?” Oh yes, wouldn’t she; and in went Alice, pushing the shopping trolley, opening the door into number 2, and going into the little kitchen to help with the disposal of the shopping. Part of her mind was sternly chiding: What do you think you are doing, letting just anybody in? Why, I might be a mugger. Another screamed: My mother can’t be living here, she can’t. Still another was saying: I’m going to blow this place down, I am, it shouldn’t be allowed.

  Mrs. Wood’s flat, and presumably Dorothy Mellings’s flat, contained two not very large rooms, with a kitchen just big enough to take a little table, at which Mrs. Wood and Alice sat close to each other, side by side, staring at a dingy yellow wall, drinking tea and eating two biscuits each. Mrs. Wood was on the pension. Working-class. She had a son in Barnet who visited on Sundays. She did not like her daughter-in-law, God forgive her. She had a grandson, aged five.

  Dorothy Mellings had no family to visit her at weekends; this thought brushed the surface of Alice’s mind, but was rejected with a gust of emotion: if her mother had decided to live in a place like this, then she must have gone mad!

  By the time Alice left, she knew to the last inch of cupboard space what her mother, three floors up, would have; and there certainly would not be room for an enormous aluminium saucepan.

  Alice stayed a good hour or more, and left with promises to return. She went to the hardware shop and bought the necessary saucepan, thinking that after all there would be many more congresses and meetings at number 43, and if she had to move, the saucepan would go with her.

  But she had received a blow; her heart whimpered and hurt her; she had no real home now. There was no place that knew her, could recognise her and take her in.

  Suddenly a whole army of recollections invaded her.

  Alice was standing in the middle of the pavement, in the rush hour, embracing an aluminium saucepan large enough to cook a small shrub, staring and apparently in a state of shock.

  She was remembering her mother’s parties. They had gone on all through her childhood and adolescence. After Alice had departed to university, seldom to return home, they had gone on still; she would hear about them from someone, probably Theresa. “One of your mother’s parties, you know—it was marvellous.” They always happened the same way. Her mother would remark, with a restless, harassed look, “It’s time we had a party; oh no, I can’t face it.” Then she would start, asking this person and that, for a date a month ahead. Her reluctance towards the party vanished, and she began to shine with energy. She asked Cedric’s political colleagues, all the people working in C. Mellings, Printers and Stationers, the innumerable people she knew, who always seemed to be floating in and out of the house anyway. She knew everyone in the street, and they were all invited. She asked a woman met at the grocer’s with whom she got into conversation, the man who came to mend the roof, a new au pair from Finland (met on a bus) who must be lonely. By the day of the party, which started at midday, as many as a hundred people were jostling one another all over the house, and half of them were probably still there at midnight, being fed out of Dorothy’s saucepan, the size of a hip bath. They were wonderful parties. Everyone said so. Alice said so. “Oh, good,” she would cry, “are we going to have another party,” and at once began fretting to help. When she was older, after ten or so, she could tell she was being useful, but as a small child she was tolerated (only just, she knew) by this whirlwind of efficiency that was her mother organising a party. Still, she insisted on arranging fruit on a dish, or disposing ashtrays around the house, while her mother reduced her pace to Alice’s. At least while “helping,” Alice did not feel quite so much as if she were a tiny creature on top of a great wave, frantically and hopelessly signalling to her mother, who stood indifferently on the shore, not noticing her.

  When there were parties, when there were people in the house, it seemed Alice became invisible to her mother, and had no place in her own home.

  People always stayed the night after the parties: drunks, or those who didn’t want to drink and drive, or some who had come from other towns. And then Dorothy would say to Alice, casually, in the full ringing confident voice that went with being so successfully in control of this great gathering of people which had made the whole house—not to mention the street—explode with noise and music for hours and hours, “Alice, you’ll just have to give up your room. Can you go down the road and sleep with Anne?” (Alice’s best friend during most of her childhood). “No, why not? Oh, go on, Alice, don’t be difficult. Then you’d better bring your sleeping bag into our room.”

  Alice always protested, complained, sulked, made a scene—manifestations that of course scarcely got noticed, so many other things were going on by that stage of the party: women guests in the kitchen washing up, intimate conversations between couples up and down the stairs, the last tipsy dancers circling around the hall. Who could possibly have time to care that Alice was sulking again? Sleeping in her parent’s bedroom made her violently emotional, and she could not cope with it.

  Four in the morning, and she was in her sleeping bag on a foam-rubber pad along the wall under the window. Cedric Mellings, in his dashing pyjamas, dark red, dark blue, was drunk or tight; at any rate expansive. He loved his wife’s parties and was proud of her. He always did the drinks, hired the glasses—coped with all that. Dorothy Mellings wore one of the beautiful things she used for sleeping in, a “Mother Hubbard” perhaps, or a kimono, or a kanga from Kenya wrapped around her in one of innumerable ways. She was tight, not much, but did not need to be, for she was high, she was exalted, she was floating, she could not stop smiling as she slid into bed by Cedric and lay there groaning theatrically, “My God, my feet.”

  He would put his arm round her, she snuggled up—a glance, a quick reminder from one or the other that Alice was in the room—some sleepy kisses, and they would be off, asleep. But Alice was not asleep. She lay there tense, in the—at last—silent house, i
n that room which was far from silent because … how much noise two sleeping people did make! Ii was not just their breathing, deep and unpredictable, coming regularly, then changing on a gulp, or a snort. Cedric tended to snore, but, apparently becoming aware of this himself, would turn over on his side, and thereafter sleep more becomingly. Not silently, though.

  That breathing of theirs going on up there in the dark, she could not stop listening, for it seemed that something was being said that she ought to be understanding—but she could not quite reach it, grasp it. The two different breathings, in and out, in and out, went on and went on, had to go on—yet could stop unpredictably for what seemed like minutes; though of course Alice knew that was nonsense, it was only because she was straining her ears with such fury of concentration that time slowed down. While one of them, Dorothy or Cedric, was in lull of breath, the other went on breathing, in and out, keeping life going, and the silent one took a breath and came back into the dialogue that seemed to be going on between them. A conversation, that was what it seemed like to the child listening there, as if her parents talked to each other still, not in words now, but in a language Alice did not know. In and out, in and out, with many little halts and hesitations and changes of pitch, they might have been questioning each other—and then (and Alice waited for it) the stage where the breathing became regular, deep and far off, further away every minute.

  Those two people there, the two great powerful people in that large bed which was the other focus of the house (the great table in the kitchen being the first)—why, it was like sleeping in the same room as two creatures that were hardly human, so alien and secretly dangerous did they seem to Alice as a child, and then growing older, at eleven or twelve, and then older still, at fifteen or so. She changed, grew up, or at least grew older, but it seemed that they did not. Nothing changed. It was always the same, that scene after the party, with the two of them, her parents, sliding into that bed of theirs, arms around each other, and then willingly sliding into the sleep which took them so far from Alice that she was always lifting herself up on her elbow to strain her eyes through the dark of the room towards the two mounds, long, heavy, that were her parents. But were not now her parents, had become impersonal, had gone away from her. Could not be reached. Not unless she crept out of her sleeping bag and went to touch one of them awake. At which Cedric, or Dorothy, would indeed come awake, return to being himself, herself; as if impostors, dark and frightening and mysterious, had inhabited those sleeping bodies but had been chased away by Alice’s touch. But then Dorothy, or Cedric, would say, sleepy and startled, “What is the matter, Alice? Go to sleep.” And they would have already turned away from her, have gone swiftly off into that other country—and the impostors were back, not Dorothy, not Cedric. And then Alice would lie awake, listening to the breathings, the snufflings, thick inarticulate mutterings coming out of that sleep that was going on above her, on the plateau of the bed; and listening to her own blood pumping and swishing through her body, and thinking how gallons of blood were swirling around up there in those two bodies.… She could not sleep; or slept, coming awake with anxiety, and, the moment there was any light behind the silent, listening curtains, which hung there all night, witnesses with her of the absence of Dorothy and Cedric from their bed, their room, their home, their children, she crept out of the room. The house, of course, was in chaos. Everywhere in it people still slept, so that she could hardly dare open a door for fear of what she would see. But in the kitchen it was safe, and there she worked away. She would have liked some help—her brother, Humphrey, for instance. But he was only too happy to accept his parents’ invitation to find some other roof to sleep under, and he was seldom there.

  After the age of about twelve, Humphrey was less and less at home, staying not just down the street for a night, but with friends all over the country, sometimes for weeks at a time. To Alice it seemed that it was the parties that began this process. Feeling the way she had done (not that they had ever talked about it, but she just knew), like some small sea creature clinging for dear life to a rock but then being battered and bashed by great waves and washed off, he had drifted away. As she had done, later. But separately; they scarcely saw each other. Asked whether she had brothers and sisters, Alice had to remind herself she had a brother.

  Alice had not thought of this for years; it was her arms stretched round the great silvery saucepan that brought it all back. And she could have gone on standing there, but someone touched her on the shoulder: a man, a workman, for he was in white overalls and carried a bag of tools—yes, the shop she stood outside was being done over—and he said, “Are you all right, love?”

  “Yes,” said Alice, “yes.” As if to say, “Why ever should you think I wasn’t?”

  “We were beginning to wonder about you,” said he. “You’d taken root, from the look of it!” He laughed, hoping she would; his kindly face—almost certainly a father’s, not to mention a husband’s—was concerned for her. And she laughed, and went on to number 43, where she carried in her saucepan to applause because of its magnificence and scope and potential, and she smiled as she stood in the kitchen working at her soup while comrades came in and out to sample it, or to make sandwiches, or sit down to eat take-away. She was, quite simply, dissolved in grief because of the loss of her real, her own home, and because of what she had been remembering as she stood there on the pavement. Good Christ, she was thinking as she stood in the kitchen smiling away (everyone’s Alice, dependable, helpful, a treat), how could they have done that to me? They took my room away from me, just like that, as if it wasn’t my room at all, as if they had only lent it to me—“Alice, you’ll just have to give up your room again.” It went on for years. What the fucking hell did they think they were doing? Why, every time she had felt that it was not really her home at all, she had no right to a place in it, and at any moment her parents would simply throw her out altogether.…

  But this is all silly, Alice was thinking, chopping, slicing, mixing, smiling. Most of the people in the world don’t have half what I had, and as for their own rooms …

  Never mind, the Congress would be such hard work, she would have to stop thinking about it all, thank goodness.

  On the Friday night, when everyone had arrived, and there were twenty-four people crowding in, the amazing soup pot fed them all, and was stocked again, at one in the morning, when everyone went to bed, to be ready for next day.

  By half past nine next morning, all the London comrades had arrived. They went over the house, exclaiming, as well they might, at its size, its comfort, its amenities. More than one, from less well endowed squats, took baths at once. The stacks of bread in the kitchen were immediately depleted, and Alice quickly ran out for some more. This weekend was going to cost … she did not want to think about it.

  Everyone praised, too, the decoration of the sitting room.

  Over the mantelpiece was an enormous red flag, with the emblem of the CCU in one corner, embroidered last night by two of the girls from Birmingham. In one corner of the soft living red was a hammer and sickle in gold, and in another a rooster and a rose, in green.

  A picture of Lenin was on the wall opposite the flag. Next to Lenin, and several times the size, was a poster of a whale: “Save the Whales!” On other walls were posters saying “Save Britain from Pollution!,” “Save Our Countryside!,” “Remember the Women of Greenham Common!,” and an IRA poster with a picture of a British soldier hitting a young boy whose arms were tied. On a table in the hall were pamphlets: The Case for the IRA, all the Greenpeace pamphlets, several books about Lenin, a long poem in free verse about Greenham Common, a large variety of pamphlets from the Women’s Movement, and on antivivisection, vegetarianism, the use of chemicals in foodstuffs, Cruise, Trident, the dumping of radioactive waste in the sea, the ill-treatment of calves and chickens, and the conditions inside Britain’s prisons.

  In the familiar, heady, but comforting atmosphere that attends the opening of such events, forty-odd
people crowded into the sitting room, seating themselves as they found places, on the floor, or on the window sills. Outside was a fitfully sunny day. Inside, the new heating was too much for some, and windows had to be opened.

  Nearly all were under thirty. Alice, she believed, was by far the oldest. Except, that is, for Roberta, who only laughed when asked her age.

  It was to Bert and Jasper that everyone looked, though it had been agreed that if Pat did in fact come, she would give the opening address.

  Bert had been listening and watching for her for days, as all the residents in number 43 knew.

  Now Bert stood at ease by the fireplace, in which was a great jar of daffodils and narcissus, leaning his elbow on the mantelpiece to show informality, and said, “This is the first National Congress of the Communist Centre Union. From small seeds grow great trees.” Energetic applause. Smiles, pleased laughter. Mary Williams and Reggie were clapping, sober but emphatic. Muriel was in a corner, on the floor. She was here as a spy, Alice reminded herself.

  Bert did not laugh. Or smile. His problem with Pat had fined him down, giving him a look of suffering restrained by thought. His easy affability had gone. He nodded briefly at the applause, and went on to say that the CCU proposed to be a nonsectarian party, taking the best from the existing socialist parties, learning from their mistakes and failures. It was determined to base itself on the great traditions of the British working class, working for radical social change towards a revolution “if needs be—and every day teaches us that the class that controls this country of ours is not going to let itself be dislodged without force.…” Applause and laughter and jeers. A revolution that would learn from the experience of the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and, if necessary, the French Revolution, for it was not too much to say that the lessons of the French Revolution had by no means been exhausted. The Congress this weekend had not been called with the aim of formulating a detailed policy, for much more work would have to be done; but to lay down broad principles. And now he, Bert Barnes, would stand down and let a much more accomplished and developed revolutionary, Comrade Willis, take the floor.