The Good Terrorist

by Doris Lessing

  He was shouting at her because he knew she was going to refuse him and the rage of rejection was already in him. He could have been threatening her, instead of suggesting a partnership.

  “All you people,” he yelled, “never lift a finger, never do any work, parasites, while people like me keep everything going.…” It seemed he was going to weep, his voice was so heavy with betrayal. “They talk about all these unemployed everywhere, people wanting work, but where are they? I can’t find anyone to work with me. So what about it, Alice?” he demanded, aggressive, accusing.

  She, of course, said no.

  He then shouted at her that she cared about no one but herself—“just like everybody else.” She had got Jim thrown out of his job and had never given a thought to him since. Where was Jim? She didn’t know or care. And Monica—oh yes, he knew all about that, he had heard, Monica had been sent off on a wild-goose chase to an empty house—he supposed that was Alice’s idea of a joke. Faye could have died, for all the trouble she was prepared to take, wouldn’t even call an ambulance. And she didn’t care about him, Philip, once she had got all she could out of him, got him working day and night for peanuts, and now she’d got her house, he—Philip—could go to the wall for all she cared about him.

  And so he raved on, half weeping, and Alice knew that if she had got up and put her arms about him he would have collapsed into her embrace like a little heap of matchsticks, with, “Alice, I’m sorry, I don’t mean it, please come and be my partner.”

  But she did not, only sat there, thinking that the windows were open, and if Joan Robbins was in the garden she could hear everything.

  Philip’s fury died into silence, and misery. He sat staring, not at her, at anywhere but her. Then he ran out of the room, and out of the house.

  Alice sat waiting for Jasper to wake. It seemed to her a good part of her life had been spent doing this. She thought again: But I’ll leave, I’ll just go. I must. No, it wouldn’t be forever, but I need time by myself.

  She found she was on her feet, opening the refrigerator, searching cupboards. She would make one of her soups. But because she had been working with Philip, there was very little in the house. She went down to the shops, bought food, took time over the preparations, sat at the table while her soup evolved. The cat arrived on the window sill, miaowed through the glass; Alice welcomed it in, offered it scraps. But no, the cat was not hungry; probably Joan Robbins or somebody had fed it. The beast wanted company. It would not sit on Alice’s lap, but lay on the window sill, and stretched out. The cat looked at Alice with its vagabond’s eyes, and let out a little sound, a grunt or miaow of greeting. Alice burst into tears in a passion of gratitude.

  The morning went past. When Jasper woke, she would explain it to him: a short break, that was what she needed.

  At midday Bert and Jasper came down together, joking about being woken by the smell of Alice’s soup. Their mood of rage, or rebellion, or whatever it had been, seemed to have vanished with their exhaustion.

  Chatty, companionable, they offered Alice little anecdotes from their trip and praised her soup. She sat listless, watching them. Her mood soon became obvious to them, and they even exchanged “Mummy-is-cross” glances at one point, earning from her a sarcastic smile.

  They abandoned attempts at placating her, and Bert said, “We’ve decided it is time we had a full discussion on policy, Comrade Alice. No, only the real revolutionaries, not the rubbish.” He bared all his lovely white teeth and sneered. Alice let it pass. Jasper, too, leaned towards her, smiling, and said, “We thought tonight. Or tomorrow night at the latest. But the point is, where? Mary and Reggie mustn’t know. Or Philip!” He, too, sneered.

  The two of them seemed to have acquired a fairly dramatic new style, thought Alice, examining them dispassionately.

  She enquired, really interested, “And how are you going to class Faye? Serious or not?”

  Their faces seemed to cloud; yes, they knew about the suicide attempt, but had not really been bothered about it.

  “Well,” said Bert, doubtfully, “I suppose she’ll be fit enough to join in, won’t she?”

  Alice laughed. It was a laugh that surprised herself, sounding so natural and even merry. She was finding these two funny, because they were so stupid.

  She said indifferently, “If you want a meeting convened, then why don’t you convene it.” She got up and attended to the cauldron of soup, adding some more split peas, salt, then water. Jasper’s and Bert’s appetites had not diminished, she noted.

  When she turned, they were sitting disconsolate, opposite to but not looking at each other. Or at her. They were reflecting, she could see, that her anger with them had justification, that they had been foolish not to take it into account. And, too, that they felt her rejection as another in a succession of rejections.

  Her heart almost melted. She said to Jasper, “I am sorry. You go off like that, all kinds of lies. Then you just turn up.… I’m sorry.”

  She went towards the door, and Jasper was beside her. She felt his frantic grip on her wrist; it was all he knew to bring her back to him. She shook off his hand quite easily, and said, “I’m sorry, Jasper.” And went out.

  From outside the door, she relented a little and said, “Let me know when you have convened the meeting.”

  She was on her way up, thinking that she would sleep, and then perhaps ring her old commune in Halifax. A few days there and she would be herself again.

  But there was a knock, loud and urgent, at the front door, and she went to it, ready for the police, but it was a woman she did not know, who said quickly, “I am Felicity, you know, from round the corner. Philip’s friend. They telephoned from hospital. Philip was in an accident. They want some of his things taken up.”

  She was already turning away on a smile, duty done, but Alice said, “Aren’t you going up?” Meaning, Isn’t this your responsibility?

  “Yes, I’ll be up to see him,” said Felicity, vaguely enough. “But not now. His things are here, aren’t they?”

  She had been an extension of number 43 all this time, but no one would think so from her manner. She was a small, brisk, authoritative woman, every bit as competent as Alice in holding her own. She was saying that she did not intend Philip to be her responsibility.

  Alice thought of Philip that morning, raging and pitiful. She said, “Oh, very well. Is he bad?”

  “He’s not dead. He could have been. He was lucky. Broken bones.” She smiled and hastened off.

  Alice went upstairs to Philip’s room. On nicely painted shelves were his clothes, tidily arranged. She found three pairs of clean pyjamas, green, blue, and brown, stacked on top of one another; a dressing gown on a hanger behind the door; toothbrush and a flannel spread to dry on the window sill; soap, electric razor. She set off, only saying through the kitchen door to Jasper and Bert that she was going to the hospital, not mentioning Philip. She did not want to hear either of them dismiss this accident as they had Faye’s wrist cutting. It was appalling, and she knew it. This meant some kind of an end for Philip. Of course he had got himself run over, or whatever had happened, because he needed to underline his situation. Make himself helpless: make his helplessness visible.

  But in the hospital Alice found it was worse than Felicity had said. Broken shoulder. Broken kneecap. Fractured left wrist. Bruises. But he also had a fractured skull. He was being taken down to the operating theatre again in a few minutes. They suspected internal damage. Meanwhile, he was unconscious. Because Alice said that as far as she knew Philip didn’t have a family, or if so, she couldn’t supply an address, the ward sister had put her down on the form as “next of kin.” Telephone number? But Alice, determined that Felicity should not slide out altogether, said Felicity must be rung in emergencies. Anyway, number 43 had no telephone.

  She then stood in a doorway, not knowing what to expect, because she had not visualised anything, and saw in the middle of a room a high slanting contraption like a machine with pulleys an
d levers and wheels and tubes, and on this, half sitting up but collapsed and limp, was Philip, all bandages and wrappings. His face was really all that was visible: dead white, blue veins fluttering on waxen lids, white lips that seemed to have some sort of dried pink dye at the corners. More than ever he seemed like a small elf, an inhuman creature, and Alice, standing there helpless, with the ward sister just behind her, could not move. She was thinking that this is what happened to marginal people, people clinging on but only just. They made one slip; something apparently quite slight happened, like the Greek, but it was part of some downward curve in a life, and that was that—they lost their hold and fell. Philip had lost his hold.

  Alice turned such a shocked face on the ward sister that she said, “Are you all right?” Deliberately perfunctory, because she did not want to cope with Alice. “Go and get yourself a cup of tea downstairs,” said the sister. “Sit down a bit.”

  Her look indicated that she was prepared to be concerned about Alice if she produced symptoms that warranted it, but Alice said, “It’s all right.” She watched the sister go to stand by Philip, looking down carefully at him for about a minute. For some reason this long close look told Alice everything. She turned and ran away down the corridors and stood waiting for the lift, and then went down in the lift, but she did not know she was doing these things. She was whimpering steadily, her eyes fixed in front of her—on Philip’s dying face.

  And now came the thought: Philip was a long way down on that curve before he asked if he could live with us. What we thought we saw was somebody at the beginning of a curve up, with a new business, everything in front of him, but it wasn’t like that at all. Probably it wasn’t even the Greek who did him in, made him lose hold—it was when Felicity threw him out. (Alice knew now that this was what had happened, from Felicity’s manner.) Perhaps long before that? Suddenly Alice knew. All of it was perfectly clear, like a graph. It was not a question of Philip’s having “lost hold.” He had never grasped hold. Something had not happened that should have happened: a teacher, or someone, should have said: This one, Philip Fowler, he must be a craftsman, do something small, and delicate and intricate; we must get him trained for that. Look how perfectly he does things! He can’t fold a shirt or arrange some chips and a piece of fish on a plate without making a picture of it.

  It had not happened. And Philip began to work for a building firm, like everyone who hasn’t a training. A painter in a building firm, losing one job after another until he said: I’ll start my own business.

  The relentlessness of it. The fucking shitty awfulness of it …

  She did not afterwards remember how she got back from the hospital. In the kitchen Roberta took one look at her and produced her remedy: brandy was poured into Alice, and Roberta put her arm around her, helped the sodden heavy girl upstairs, got her into her sleeping bag, drew curtains.

  Alice slept through the two events of that evening.

  The first was that the vicious policeman from the station came in with a policewoman, on some business to do with a stolen car. Jasper and Bert were there, and things didn’t go well, would certainly have ended in violence and arrests, only luckily Mary and Reggie appeared, and dealt with the police in their own language, on their own terms. But Mary and Reggie were afterwards cold, were disapproving, saying that there was really no need for trouble with the police if people knew how to handle them. “And, of course, if they behave themselves,” was implicit.

  They went upstairs, but Reggie came down again almost at once to ask whether in fact Jasper and Bert knew anything about the stolen car?

  “We are revolutionaries,” said Bert, furious. “Not crooks.”

  Then, late, after twelve, Felicity came again to say the hospital had telephoned. Philip was dead. She was very upset, so Alice was told next day. She had had to be asked in, fed Alice’s soup and Roberta’s brandy.

  None of this Alice knew till next day. Mid-morning. They were all in the kitchen, the sun coming in, the cat on the window sill.

  She said, first, “He went under fast, didn’t he?”—mentally seeing a small broken thing, like a bird or an insect, trying to clutch hold of a straw, a twig, and failing. The others did not understand, but Faye, with a cold smile, said, “Lucky Philip.” Mary said that Philip had struck her as unstable.

  Alice remarked that if the police had got this house in their minds as the place to come and have a bit of fun, then it wouldn’t be worth living here. The others of course stared at her, curious: the indifference with which she said it, that was the thing.

  Then Alice got up and went upstairs, put Philip’s ladder in position, climbed into the attic, and stood under the great rotten beams, keeping the light of the torch on them. She was thinking—or trying to think, to make her mind, or her comprehension, accept it—that Philip had tackled everything else in the house, all the threats and dangers. But this threat, the main one, he had not dealt with, could not. Because—simply—of his size. Because there was nothing to him but a handful of frail bones and a skim of flesh. Alice could see in her mind’s eye the sort of man who could have pulled down these two rotten beams, then put in others. A large bale of a man (she could see him), shouldering the beams into place. Effortlessly. Humbled but uncomprehending because of the arbitrariness, the frivolity, of life, she went downstairs again, and remarked that if those beams were not dealt with, the house would start falling in, from the top. She sat in the chair she had been in before going upstairs to the beams, at the side of the table. At head and foot, like mother and father, sat Mary and Reggie. They radiated disapproval. They knew they did, but not that they were full of panic as well.

  “The beams are obviously going to have to be put right,” said Mary.

  Jasper and Bert, Faye and Roberta, who had been observing Alice put things right for weeks, all looked at her, waiting for her to say, perhaps, “It is all right, I have fixed everything.” Jocelin and Caroline were uninvolved.

  Alice remarked, “Oh, so you have found yourself a flat, then?”

  Startled, even affronted, Mary said, “Yes, but how did you …?” And Reggie, “But we haven’t told anybody yet; it’s not final.”

  “And so,” said Alice, “this house is back on the list, is it?”

  “Not for demolition,” said Mary. “It was agreed a mistake was made. Both this house and number forty-five will be converted. But, at any rate, nothing will happen immediately. The point is, there will be plenty of time for you to find somewhere else.”

  “Find another squat,” said Reggie kindly.

  Again the others looked at Alice, who had put so much into this house, and again seemed surprised that she was unconcerned.

  She was examining Mary, examining Reggie, quite frankly, for she needed to know what happened. She could see the two, sitting up side by side in their marriage bed, discussing them all, with identical looks of scandalised criticism. Jim. Faye’s suicide attempt. Now Philip. Alice saw that they must have felt trapped among lunatics. Well, never mind, these two good houses were saved, and a lot of people had found shelter for a time.

  “Have you got a job?” asked Alice, sure that Reggie had.

  Again, annoyance; because, of course, the middle classes did not like to be so transparent.

  “As it happens, yes,” said Reggie. “It’s a new firm, in Guildford. Of course, it’ll be a risk, the failure rate with new firms at the moment being what it is. But it’s an interesting venture; it may succeed.”

  The fact that he didn’t say what it was meant, Alice thought, that the “venture” was something they, the others, would criticise. Chemicals; Reggie was a chemist. Well, she couldn’t be bothered to be interested.

  Reggie got up. Mary got up. Smiles all around. But relief was what they felt. Body language. Written all over them. They had felt, Mary and Reggie, that they should sit for a while with the others, because of Philip’s death, and now that was enough, they could go back upstairs and get on with their own, sensible lives. They wouldn’t
lose hold of life and slip down and away, to be washed into some gutter.

  Funny, thought Alice. Sitting around this table, let’s say three weeks ago, all of us. You’d not have said that Philip was due to lose hold. Jim? Yes. And Faye …? Alice was careful not to look at Faye, feeling that a look at this moment would be like a doom or a sentence. To her, Alice, the room seemed full of ghosts, and her heart ached for poor little Philip, who had tried so hard, been so gallant. It wasn’t fair.

  Well, with Reggie and Mary off soon, there wouldn’t be many left here. Jasper and Bert and herself. Caroline and Jocelin. Faye and Roberta. Seven.

  Pat, gone. Jim, gone. Philip, gone. Comrade Andrew—disappeared somewhere. Even the goose-girl seemed to Alice, in this mood, like some good old friend, taken from her. Very well, let them take this house away. Why not? She wasn’t going to care. She knew she had her look: she could feel Jasper’s eyes on her. To avoid them, she got up and began preparations for another cauldron of soup.

  “Comrade Alice,” said Bert in his political voice, “we are all here. We had decided to have a meeting when Reggie and Mary crashed in.”

  “Oh, were you going to bother to call me?” asked Alice. But she came back to her seat, noting that Bert and Jasper had put themselves at the head and the foot of the table.

  Mid-afternoon. Sunshine. Joan Robbins was cutting her hedge with old-fashioned shears. Clack, clack, clack, with irregular intervals that kept the ears straining. In the jug on the stool were some early roses. Yellow. The cat lay on the window sill outside the glass, looking in.

  Bert began, “In view of our observations in Moscow and subsequent discussions, Jasper and I agree that we should formulate a new policy. Of course it will have to be discussed fully in its implications, but, just to indicate where our conclusions are pointing, we have a tentative formulation. That the comrades present see no reason to accept directives from Moscow.”