The Good Terrorist

by Doris Lessing

  “Then I suppose Andrew told you,” concluded Muriel. “He shouldn’t have.” She stood reflecting for a moment, and then said, “I am quite relieved to be moving out of his sphere. I’ll be happier with someone on a higher level.”

  “Isn’t he on a high level?”

  “If he were, he wouldn’t be dealing with people like us,” said Muriel, with a sudden, unexpected, intense sentimentality.

  Alice laughed in astonishment that Muriel could admit, even in a maudlin moment, she was on a lower level than anyone at all.

  “No,” said Muriel, “he’s off for more training, too. And in my view he could do with it. There’s something a good deal wrong with his judgement, sometimes.”

  With this, she again grasped her case, lifted it, and went to the door, saying, “Well, good-bye. I don’t suppose we shall see each other again. Unless you decide to go for training, too. Comrade Andrew is going to suggest it.” Her tone made it quite clear what she thought of Comrade Andrew’s plan.

  But Alice had suddenly understood something else. She said wildly, “Good God, I’ve just seen—Pat is going, too, she is, isn’t she?”

  “If she told you, she shouldn’t have,” said Muriel.

  “She didn’t, no, she didn’t. I’ve just …”

  “I’m late,” said Muriel, and walked firmly away from Alice, showing a degree of relief that made Alice think, Well, she’s going to need a lot of training, not to show every little thing that’s going through her mind.

  She went slowly back to number 43 and sat by herself in the kitchen, at the table, thinking.

  The strongest thought, which was more a feeling, or an ache, was that Jasper had not told her he had believed he would be away for months. Yes, he had been “nice” to make up for it. But he had not told her! He had never before betrayed her. Yes, of course, there had always been a part of his life she was not told about; she accepted that. But politics—there everything had been discussed.

  He had become capable of going off for six months, a year, and not saying a word. Bert? It was Bert’s influence?

  Yes, of course, there was the question of security, she could see that. But that did not change how she felt.

  Something had been cut between him and her; he had severed himself from her.

  She was going to do something about it—leave, go to another commune, give him up (but at this she went cold and sad all over), tell him that … tell him something or other, but she wouldn’t go on like this. People were right, he made use of her.

  With this, she took the packet of Comrade Andrew’s money from its place in the sleeping bag and went to the post office.

  Then she returned to the kitchen table, and sat on in the late afternoon, watching the light go out of the sky, feeling the house go dark about her. She did not want to have to talk to anyone, so when she heard Reggie and Mary, she went walking around and about the streets by herself. For some time she stood outside the flats where her mother lived. The lights she could see up the front of the building were none of them her mother’s, for the flat was at the back. She went to peer at the little glow that showed Mellings, scribbled on a card. Then she walked home, hoping the kitchen would be empty. It was eleven.

  No one was about. She would have a good sleep, and decide what to do in the morning. Probably visit one or other of the communes or squats where she had friends. Or perhaps she would go to the Marxist Summer Festival in Holland. She would be bound to meet people she knew there; and if not, she would soon make new friends.

  One thing she was already determined on: she would not be here when Jasper and Bert returned in ten days’ time—no, less than a week now.

  She would have liked to sink at once into a deep sleep and get away from thinking, but no one slept much in number 43 that night, for Faye was shouting and screaming and hammering on the walls.

  Alice thought, for the first time, that the reason Faye was here, and not in the women’s commune where the two spent so many of their days, was that she was not welcome there—had been thrown out, in fact. They would not put up with this madwoman. They had had enough. Obvious, when you thought of it: she could spend the day there, but not the night, disturbing people’s sleep. But poor Roberta! Her low, urgent, kind voice was at work nearly all night, soothing and admonishing.

  Lying awake, listening to Faye’s distress, her misery, Alice thought as usual that one day soon there would be no people like Faye. Because of people like Alice. Even Muriel. No more people damaged by life.

  She thought, too—steadily, letting her mind open out into one perspective after another—of the implications of what she had learned since she had come here. She simply hadn’t had any idea before! All over the country were these people—networks, to use Comrade Andrew’s word. Kindly, skilled people watched, and waited, judging when people (like herself, like Pat) were ripe, could be really useful. Unsuspected by the petits bourgeois who were in the thrall of the mental superstructure of fascist-imperialistic Britain, the poor slaves of propaganda, were these watchers, the observers, the people who held all the strings in their hands. In factories, in big industries (where Comrade Andrew wanted her, Alice, to work); in the Civil Service (that was just the place for Comrade Muriel!); in the BBC, in the big newspapers—everywhere, in fact, was this network, and even in little unimportant places like these two houses, numbers 43 and 45, just ordinary squats and communes. Nothing was too small to be overlooked, everyone with any sort of potential was noticed, observed, treasured.… It gave her a safe, comfortable feeling.

  Alice slept at last, when Faye became silent, and would have slept on through the morning, but Roberta knocked on her door, then called through it that there was something important she had to say.

  Alice sat up at once, ready for bad news.

  Roberta looked awful, naturally enough. Her eyes were red, her face dragged with exhaustion. More, she had been broken down, or back, into the other Roberta. There was a sluttish look about her, like a slum woman from a 1930s film, particularly when she put a cigarette into her mouth and let it hang on her lip as she talked, crouching beside Alice’s sleeping bag. She was in a soiled dressing gown.

  “Alice, I’ve had bad news. My mother is in hospital in Bradford. I’ve got to go. Do you see? I’ve got to.”

  Alice saw that Roberta was still reasoning with Faye in her mind, and asked, “What’s wrong with her?”

  Roberta said, sullen, “Cancer. She’s been ill for a long time. Should have gone before.”

  Her voice, too, was regressing: North Country intonations strengthened there. Did she come from some awful slum in a Northern industrial town?

  Alice was already seeing it all. She was going to be asked to “keep an eye” on Faye, who could not be left in the women’s commune; without Roberta they would not have Faye even in the day. She, Alice, for an unspecified period of days, would have to …

  She said, “As a matter of fact, I had just decided to take off.” Her voice sounded hard and sullen, like Roberta’s.

  But at this Roberta began a noisy weeping. She grabbed Alice’s hand and held it hard, looking into Alice’s eyes, with, “Oh, Alice, please, please, please, I can’t leave Faye with no one, how can I?”

  Roberta was trembling. Alice could feel her exhaustion coming into her, through her tightly grasping hand.

  “And you have no idea how long you will be gone, or anything,” said Alice.

  Roberta let go Alice’s hand, and sat staring over her hunched-up knees, the cigarette lolling on her lip, eyes empty. The last ditch.

  “Oh, God,” said Alice. “I suppose I’ve got to. But I’m not you, Roberta. I’m not going to baby Faye along, the way you do.…”

  Roberta suddenly went limp. She put her head on her knees, knocking the cigarette onto the sleeping bag. Alice tidily retrieved it, and sat watching Roberta crouched in a womb position, arms around her knees.

  “Alice,” she heard, “you don’t know what this means to me. You can’t …”


  “Of course I do,” said Alice. “Without you, Faye couldn’t manage at all. She would be in a loony bin. You spend all your time making sure she doesn’t fall into their hands.”

  Roberta straightened, sat up, tears spilling everywhere, said in appeal, “Alice …”

  “But there’s another side to it, too. She behaves worse with you than with anyone. You let her.”

  As Roberta protested, Alice went on reasonably, “Oh no, I’m not saying she isn’t a nut—she is—but I’ve noticed before that sometimes someone like that behaves quite ordinarily with everybody, manages everything, you’d never think she was a nut, but there’s just one person, with that person, she’s out of control. It makes you wonder,” said Alice.

  Roberta was watching her closely. A new cigarette was being lit, but while this operation went on, Roberta’s eyes did not leave Alice’s face. Alice saw that the Roberta of number 43 was there again, and the poor Roberta of some dreadful past, once more buried and gone.

  Roberta said, not at all annoyed, “Yes, I’ve thought that myself. It is strange, isn’t it? Faye is normal with everyone else—well, nearly always.…” Here she invited Alice, with a small rueful smile, to remember the incident when Faye ran shrieking downstairs to expel Monica. And other things. “She’ll probably be all right with you.”

  “If she doesn’t try to commit suicide.”

  A sharp look, repudiating. A quick shake of the head, which meant, Alice knew: I am not prepared even to think about that.

  “Well, we have to think about it.”

  “Look, Alice, I must get dressed and go. I’ve got an hour to catch the train.”

  Roberta ran out, and came back, as Alice knew she would, with bottles of pills.

  “If you make sure she takes these in the morning, and these before she goes to bed …”

  Alice took the bottles with a look that said: You know very well I can’t make her do anything.

  Roberta said, “It’s no good saying thank you, what’s the good of thank you. But if I can help you some time …”

  She went, and five minutes later Alice heard her go downstairs, running, and out of the house.

  Faye would not wake till midday, or later.

  Alice took her time with bathing and dressing, and was in the kitchen drinking coffee when Caroline came in.

  She had been wanting to be friends with Caroline, but now she felt that this was bound to be some last straw.

  Caroline said, moving to the kettle and the coffee jar, as if she already lived there, “Alice, I’ve come to ask if it would be all right if I moved in.”

  Alice only shrugged; but held out her mug to Caroline, for a refill.

  Caroline, after a quick inspection of Alice from those sharp eyes of hers, filled the two cups and sat down with hers, at the other end of the table.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Alice told her.

  “Only a short-term problem,” pronounced Caroline, dismissing it.

  Alice laughed. “Very well, then,” she said, “so what’s wrong next door?”

  Caroline sat briskly stirring sugar into her cup, in itself a gesture that announced self-determination in these days when people confess to sugar as once they might have done to a drink problem. One, two, three large teaspoons went in, and Caroline took up the mug to drink, with a frank and greedy enjoyment.

  Alice laughed again, differently. She had been right: she and Caroline were already at the start of that mysterious process known as “getting on.”

  “The police raided us again last night.”

  “Haven’t you arranged with the Council yet?”

  “We were always going to do it, but we didn’t get around to it. Anyway, that wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “So what were they looking for?”

  “They were certainly looking for something. They took the place apart.”

  “But nothing there?”

  “Nothing.”

  Caroline was waiting for the questions that Alice was framing in her mind.

  “So somebody did inform?”

  “We think not. Actually, I think they were looking for smack.”

  “But nobody uses it, do they?”

  “Pot, of course. Not heroin. No, I think they thought forty-five was a cache. You know, a bale or two of best-quality heroin lurking beneath the floor.”

  Alice was thinking, intently. Her face was puckered up, like an anxious dog’s.

  “Hey, relax,” said Caroline, “no harm done.”

  “How long were … things coming in and out, next door?”

  “Not long. A few weeks. And usually only for a day or so. Sometimes an hour or two.”

  “Always for Comrade Andrew?”

  “Well, he organised it all.”

  “How did Comrade Andrew get to next door in the first place?”

  “He met Muriel somewhere. He really goes for Muriel.”

  “You’re saying that he chose forty-five to live in because Muriel was there?”

  “He hasn’t been living there. He’s in and out. I don’t suppose he’s ever been there longer than two or three days at a time.”

  “And Comrade Muriel goes for Andrew.”

  “Actually, I think it is she who turns the cheek.”

  “Oh well, I don’t care about all that,” said Alice, as usual saddened and disgusted. “Anyway, it all seems very hit and miss.”

  “Why? The proof’s in the pudding. The police have actually been in three times while I’ve been here. They never found anything. Once half the rubbish sacks had just enough rubbish to cover what was really in them.”

  “Which was?”

  “Oh,” said Caroline airily, spooning up thick wet yellow sugar from the bottom of her mug, and licking it slowly with a fat pink tongue, “things, you know.”

  Alice was silent. She was taking in everything she could of this plump, healthy creature who sat there exuding physical enjoyment. She was trying to understand the secret of it. But, noted Alice, though she might look like a sleek seal, smiling away and talking—presumably—about explosives, her pupils remained tight and unrelenting. They gave her a shrewd, even cold, look, and Alice was relieved to see it. She felt Caroline could be relied on.

  “Well, I suppose explosives,” she remarked indifferently. “That’s what I thought from the start, really.”

  “Well, that kind of thing. But I said to Comrade Andrew, I said, ‘Have any of us actually been asked about what comes in and out? I don’t seem to remember a vote being taken?’ ”

  “You were there before he was?”

  “Long before. I moved in a year ago. I was there alone for weeks. Then Muriel came. Then, suddenly, Andrew came. We never knew how Muriel had heard of it—Comrade Muriel is not, I would say, one of the world’s natural squatters.”

  “No.”

  “But she took the place over. The next thing was Paul and Edward—now, I think that she asked them in because Andrew told her to. Then I asked some friends of mine, three girls, who were in a bad squat in Camberwell. But Muriel soon got rid of them.”

  “How?”

  “Not so much”—said Caroline judiciously, smiling with the pleasure she was getting from talking and being understood—“not so much by what she did, but by what she is …” She waited for Alice to laugh. Alice laughed. Caroline went on, “They simply did not like the way Muriel assumed command, and then when Andrew moved in, they left.”

  Alice sat thinking. She knew, from how Caroline was eyeing her, that thinking was what she was supposed to be doing.

  “Very well,” said Alice at last. “So you don’t like Comrade Andrew.”

  “Who is Comrade Andrew?” asked Caroline. “Who is he to give orders and say what is and what is not to happen?”

  “We don’t have to do what he says. It is up to us to say no or yes.”

  “But difficult to say no when a car simply arrives with five cases of pamphlets. Or something.”

  More coffee. More sugar. Ali
ce could not prevent herself from thinking: But your teeth …

  “And,” pronounced Caroline, smiling, amenable, sociable, but her little brown eyes hard and controlled, “do you know something? I do not give a damn about the fucking bloody Soviet Union. Or about the fucking KGB. Or any of that.”

  “KGB” used like that did give Alice a bit of a shock; she had not actually said to herself, I am involved with the KGB. Besides, the words had a ruthless quality which was hard to associate with Comrade Andrew. She was silent, then said, “But it is a useful way to get trained. I mean, for some people.”

  “For some people. And if they want that kind of training.”

  “There is something about it all that doesn’t fit,” Alice said at last, with difficulty. It was hard to criticise Comrade Andrew. Aloud, at least; in her thoughts she could not prevent herself.

  “Exactly. And do you know what it is? I have—strangely enough—been giving the matter my most earnest consideration.”

  Alice laughed, as she was expected to.

  “Yes. In my experience, which is not vast, but enough, everything turns out to be some kind of a muddle. You are imagining amazing fantastic brilliant plots, organised down to the last fantastically efficient detail, but no, when you discover the truth about anything, let alone KGB plots, it is always some stupid silly mess.”

  Now Alice was really disturbed. It was because this was something her mother said. Had been saying recently—part of this new, upsetting phase she was in. Over and over again in the last four years, how many times had Alice not heard Dorothy Mellings exclaim, and with a relish in the scandal of it all that made Alice furious, “Just another bloody balls-up, that’s all. They’ve blown it! They’ve fucked it up. Oh, don’t waste your time sitting there trying to work it all out! It’s just another little mess.” Usually to Zoë Devlin. Who would try to reason with her—with Dorothy. In the way that she had recently been doing—reasoning with her mother, patiently, perseveringly, when she said this kind of thing. “Dorothy, everything can’t be a muddle, it’s just not on to slide out of it all like that! What’s got into you, Dorothy? It’s as if you can’t be bothered to think anything out any more?” And Dorothy Mellings to Zoë Devlin: “Who’s sliding out? I think you are. You are living in some kind of rose-pink dreamworld, you think everything goes along, all sensible and as the result of mature decisions! Well, it doesn’t! It’s just a great big bleeding mess.”