The Good Terrorist

by Doris Lessing

  “Listen, Alice. And this is for the last time. I don’t know why you don’t seem able to take it in. It’s not very complicated.” She now leaned forward, eyes fixed on Alice’s pudgy, pathetic, protesting face, and spoke slowly, spelling it all out.

  “When your father left me, he said I could stay in the house. I was to have the top floor converted into a self-contained flat. I would let the flat and it would pay expenses. Rates. Electricity. Gas.” Alice nodded at this, connecting with what was being said. Encouraged, Dorothy went on, “But instead I took in you and Jasper. You wrote asking if you could come home for a bit.”

  “I don’t remember anything like that. You wrote to me and said why didn’t I come home for a bit?”

  “Well. Very well, Alice. As you like. I’m not going to argue. There’s no point. However it happened, you did come home. I took you and Jasper in. I told your father some people needed a long time to grow up—I was talking about you, of course. I don’t care about Jasper.”

  A chill of rejection afflicted Alice. She strengthened herself, as she had done so often, to take the burden of it, on Jasper’s behalf.

  “Your father kept on saying, ‘Throw them out. They are old enough to fend for themselves. I don’t see why I should have to keep that pair of scroungers.’ But I couldn’t. I couldn’t, Alice.” This last was said in a different voice, the first “nice” voice Alice had heard from her mother that evening. It was low, hurt, an appeal.

  Alice felt strengthened by it and said, “Well, of course, that big house and only you in it, and your cronies coming in and out.”

  Dorothy was again surprised by Alice. She peered at her daughter, the frown well established.

  “It’s funny,” she said, “how you simply don’t seem to be able to take it in.” If Alice seemed unable to grasp an essential point about the situation, then Dorothy was unable to take in an essential fact about Alice. “Why can’t you?” she enquired, not of Alice but of the room, the air, something or other. “I simply cannot make you see … The point is, I would be there now, at home, if it weren’t for you and Jasper. No, Alice, I am not blaming you, I am blaming myself.” Another good gulp of Scotch. At this rate she would be tight soon. Then Alice would simply leave! She hated her mother tight; it was then she began saying all those negative things.

  “And so that’s it, Alice. Though why I bother to say it all again, I can’t imagine. You are not my favourite person, Alice. I don’t particularly want to see you.”

  Alice was wrestling with a difficult thought. Her face was screwed up. She bit her pink lips. She looked offended, as if Dorothy had said, “I don’t like the blouse you are wearing.”

  “But when Jasper and I left, why didn’t you get the flat converted then, and let it?”

  “Because,” Dorothy spelled it out, “I had spent the money Cedric gave me for converting the flat. On you. That means on Jasper, of course. Besides, since the only way I could get rid of you seemed to be to move, I had already arranged everything with the estate agent. As you know, since you were making the telephone calls …” She stopped herself, sighed. “No, of course it wasn’t that. Your father said he had had enough. That was the reason. Cedric said: Enough! And I don’t blame him.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Alice, “what do you mean, I made the telephone calls?”

  “Well, of course you did. You took it all on, didn’t you? Being helpful. As only you know how to be.”

  “I made the calls?”

  Alice could remember nothing of that. Dorothy could not believe Alice did not remember. For the thousandth time the situation was recurring where Alice said, “I don’t remember, no, you’re wrong,” thinking that her mother maliciously made things up, while Dorothy sighed and pursued interesting thoughts about the pathology of lying.

  “In any case, you could have said you had changed your mind.”

  This time Dorothy’s sigh was elaborate and histrionic. “In the normal world, Alice—but you wouldn’t know anything about that—there are such things as contracts.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Alice.

  “Quite so. Shit. But there were two reasons I wouldn’t have changed my mind, even if Cedric had changed his. For one thing, I wanted to be rid of all that. You did me a great service, Alice. There was a time I could have wrung your neck—I felt like a visitor in my own house; I could hardly go into my own kitchen—then suddenly I thought, My God, what a release! I am free of all that. Who said I had to spend my life buying food and cooking it? Years, years of my life I’ve spent, staggering around with loads of food and cooking it and serving it to a lot of greedy-guts who eat too much anyway.”

  Here Alice’s sound of protest was like a moan, and she stared with frantic eyes at her mother: stop, please stop, before you destroy everything, even the memories of our lovely house.

  But this dangerous, destructive force that was now her mother did not hear her, or decided to take no notice, for she was going on, in a hard, cold, but amused voice, as if nothing, but nothing, was to be taken seriously. “And the other reason was, there was this fantastic deal: those Germans—what’s their name? You know, you spoke to them—wanted to buy the house as it stood with carpets and curtains—the lot. But I had to get out fast to fit their schedule. And you and Jasper wouldn’t get out, no matter what I said.” Here Dorothy Mellings put her head back and laughed, while Alice, eyes wide, knuckles of her left hand between her teeth—she would have toothmarks there—sat looking as if she would simply dissolve in front of her mother’s eyes in a puddle of tears. “Then Cedric rang Jasper up and said if he didn’t get out, the police would be called in. Then, thank God, you left, and I had the estate agent hounding me to get the place ready. The next thing was, as soon as the house was cleaned up, some joker got in and stole every stitch of curtain.” She rocked with laughter. It was the kind of laughter she shared with Zoë Devlin, certainly, but it was not being shared with Alice. “Not a bloody curtain left. With the what’s-their-names coming in in four days. They were livid. They had contracted for curtains, and curtains they were going to have! The deal was off!” Here Dorothy had another good swallow of Scotch. “I lost the flat I was going into: I had to tell them what had happened. They were nice about it, but they couldn’t wait. It was a good flat, but actually I am pleased. It was too big for me. I really need something this size. I wanted to be done with it all.”

  Hearing, correctly, “I wanted to be done with you,” Alice felt her eyes at last fill with tears which ran down her face.

  “Some people from Yorkshire took the house, without curtains. For two thousand less, but by then I was past caring. This flat was available. It’s fine. The simpler the better. When I think, the years of my life I’ve spent fussing.”

  Alice said in a doleful little voice, “I am sorry I took the rug.”

  “Oh yes, so you did. Well, as it happens, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have room for it anyway, so you might as well have it.”

  Alice snuffled and sniffed, and then said, “I am sorry I called you a fascist.”

  “Wha-a-at?” Dorothy seemed incredulous. “A fascist, did you? Well, well. And what about all the other things. A fascist. Who cares about your naughty little swearwords.”

  “What did I say? I didn’t …” Somewhere at the back of Alice’s mind there still reverberated that parting scene when she had screamed abuse at her mother, and so had Jasper. Incandescent, she had been. Molten with rage.

  “Are you still with Jasper?” demanded Dorothy.

  Another Alice, all rectitude and certainty, banished the snuffling child. “Of course. I am with Jasper. You know that.”

  “Oh, God, Alice,” said Dorothy Mellings, suddenly offering her daughter the simple warm sincerity that was what Alice remembered of her mother, particularly of the last four years in her house, and for which she had been starving. “Oh, God, why don’t you get a job? Do something?”

  “You seem to have overlooked the fact that we have over three million unemployed,
” said Alice self-righteously.

  “Oh, rubbish. You got a better degree than most of your mates. All my friends’ children of your age got jobs and have careers. You could have done, too, if you had wanted. You didn’t even try. Well, you could start now—your father could help. Have you seen Cedric?”

  “No, I don’t want to,” said Alice. “I’m not going to live that kind of life. I’m not going to sit in an office nine to five.”

  Suddenly wild with exasperation, with loss, with incomprehension, Dorothy cried out, “Oh, I did so want something decent for you, Alice. I had no proper education, as you know—God knows I dinned it into you.… I was married when I was nineteen. There should be a law against it. And then I just kept house and looked after you and your brother and cooked and cooked and cooked. I am unemployable. I used to sit there, when you and your brother were babies, thinking how my friends were all making something of themselves. And I was stuck. Do you remember Rosemary Holmes? Did you know she’s at Bart’s? She’s a world specialist, in something to do with the liver. There you are, I am so ignorant, I don’t even know what. We were at school together. But she went to university.”

  This wild loose emotion of her mother’s was having the effect of tightening Alice up, making her feel prim and disapproving. Seeing her mother getting tight, at parties or otherwise, was the main reason why Alice never drank. There had always been a point, when Dorothy drank, where some awful malevolence spilled out of her, like a vicious chemical, burning everything it touched. But the destructiveness that once had jetted out of her only when she was drunk, as if from an overpressured container kept in some corner deep inside her, seemed now to have taken her over, so that nothing was safe from her sarcastic hostility: not her children, her friends, her former husband, or anything in her past.

  Alice thought, as she watched Dorothy staring with heavy sorrowful eyes into some lost opportunity or other, Well, what does she think she should have been, then?

  Dorothy said, “I would have been a good doctor, I know. You know what you would have been good at. I’d have been a good farmer, too. And an explorer.”

  “An explorer!” jeered Alice feebly, and Dorothy said, “Yes, an explorer.” Her glass was empty. She got up, went to the shelf, poured another liberal dose of whisky, sat down. She was not looking at Alice. “I haven’t done anything with my life.” She was even smiling, contemptuous, as she negated Alice in this way. “I used to look at you when you were little, and I thought, Well, at least I’ll make sure that Alice gets educated, she’ll be equipped. I won’t have Alice stuck in my position, no qualifications for anything. But it turned out that you spend your life exactly as I did. Cooking and nannying for other people. An all-purpose female drudge.” She laughed bitterly, demolishing all the lovely years Alice thought about so longingly, killing the old Dorothy Mellings who shed warmth everywhere, people coming to her, surrounding her, wanting what she had—the gift of filling everything about her with life.

  Alice was hurt beyond speaking, sat in a dwarfed, shrinking position, listening as her mother went on: “This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there’s a layer of people who run everything. But we—we’re just peasants. We don’t understand what’s going on, and we can’t do anything.”

  Alice found she was becoming herself again. “Don’t be silly, we can do anything we like.”

  “Oh, you, running about playing at revolutions, playing little games, thinking you’re important. You’re just peasants, you’ll never do anything.”

  “You don’t understand, Mother,” said Alice, calm and confident. “We are going to pull everything down. All of it. This shitty rubbish we live in. It’s all coming down. And then you’ll see.”

  This brought Dorothy back to herself. Her dry watchfulness returned, she set a distance between herself and her daughter; her green eyes again seemed like stones, and she said, “And then you are going to build it all up again in your own image! What a prospect.” She laughed. And as Alice began to go red, rising to her feet, “Oh, don’t misunderstand me, you probably will. With so many of you around, with only one thought in your minds, how to get power for yourselves …” She was laughing loudly, her half-drunk laugh, which Alice so hated. “Yes, I can see it all. Jasper will probably be Minister of Culture—he’s the type for it. He loathes anything decent, and he once wrote a terrible novel he couldn’t get published. And you’ll be his willing aide.”

  Alice was going to burst, she was so furious, standing there, fists clenched, face working and red.

  “Oh, God, Alice,” said Dorothy Mellings, “do go away. I’m just fed up with you, can’t you see that? I just can’t be bothered with you.”

  Alice shrieked, “You’ll see, you shitty old fascist. You and your fascist friends. That’s all you care about.…” She was incoherent, panting, sweating. “But you just wait. Everything is rotten. It’s all undermined. But you’re so dozy and stupid and you can’t even see it. We are going to pull it all down.” And she even came over to her mother and gave her a push on the shoulder, so that Dorothy had to hold on to the table edge. “You’ll all see,” Alice yelled finally, and ran out of the room, slamming the door.

  Fuelled by an anguish of rage, Alice dashed down the stairs and then the street, turned a corner, and became part of the thin late crowd dispersing from the Underground. A block away, two strolling policemen approached, and Alice became at once the good citizen coming home after an evening’s fun. She knew one of the policemen. He had been on that very first raid. He did not know her. She nodded at him, and smiled, ratepayer who paid his wages. He said, “Good evening.”

  Well, they had orders to fraternise, thought Alice, allowing her face, her body, to scorn him, once safely past. But her real anger had gone into her pounding race along the pavement. Now she was thinking of her mother with a strong protective pity. Two shitty little rooms! Dorothy looked so big in that sitting room; if she turned too quickly she might knock a wall down. Spending her evenings talking to Zoë Devlin and reading books! Alice now examined, from a stored mental picture, titles from the two tidy little strips of shelves up the walls, and from the pile of books on the floor by the big chair. What did she want to read that kind of book for! She might just as well still be at school. When Zoë Devlin came to spend the evening they sat opposite each other and talked about life. No. About books. No, of course, they had that row. Well, that was ridiculous; they’d have to make it up; they’d been like sisters; they said so themselves. A stupid shitty row … well, quite a lot of quarrels, really.

  Alice was standing on the pavement, like a child playing statues, apparently waiting for a taxi or to be given a lift. She was—unwillingly—seeing the scene of that dreadful final row between her mother and Zoë. It was in the old sitting room, on the first floor, which stretched from front to back and from side to side of the old house, windows all round, and through the windows views of garden and trees. Dorothy Mellings and Zoë faced each other, pale, too serious to shout or insult each other, as they had done before, but then always made it up, laughing. Two tall strong handsome elderly women, with the lovely room stretching away all around them to the windows, and, beyond them, the gardens.

  Alice’s vision seemed to shift. Two old women. Ancient. They both looked so battered and beaten. Alice felt their being old as an affront to her. How had they got like this so quickly? Why had they? Why had they let it happen? Why didn’t they care? Didn’t they see how ridiculous they were, taking themselves so seriously?

  Three days before that, these two women had broken off an argument, saying that if they did not, they would start hitting each other.

  On that occasion, Dorothy had said, “You and I met on the Aldermaston marches. We met because of our political attitudes. That is what we had in common.”

  Zoë had said, “Oh, all the rest didn’t count, of course! We’ve been friends for twenty years!”

  “Zoë, do you realise t
hat I have to censor everything I say to you now? I can’t talk to you about anything I am really thinking?”

  “Well, there’s plenty to talk about.”

  “No, there isn’t. I’m not wasting my time gossiping and talking about whether we should eat butter and bacon or not. Or start making our own pasta. That’s what we talk about.”

  “You’ve got so bloody reactionary, that’s the trouble.”

  “Don’t stick bloody stupid labels on me. You’re back in the nineteenth century, all of you. Weeping about the Tolpuddle Martyrs and singing the Red Flag. You are a bad joke.”

  “You used not to think it was a joke.”

  “No. I do now. Do you realise I have to think twice before I invite you here? You can’t be invited with anyone who has a different political opinion on anything, because you start calling them fascists! You won’t meet anyone, even, who reads a right-wing newspaper. You’ve become a dreary bigot, Zoë, do you know that?”

  “And you are a fascist! Not far off one. Reading books about the KGB, and seeing Reds under every bed.”

  “There are Reds under every bed,” said Dorothy seriously. “God, when I think it used to be a joke, do you remember? The funny thing was, we were the Reds under the beds.” And Dorothy had started to laugh. Zoë had remained serious, fiercely accusing: “The next thing, you’ll be supporting Reagan’s and Thatcher’s foreign policies.”

  “I’ve been wondering whether I shouldn’t. After all, forty years ago it wasn’t fascist to fight for the bad against the worse. Why is it now?”

  “I’m just going to leave, Dorothy. If I didn’t, I think I’d hit you.”

  “Yes, I think you’d better.”

  That had been three days before. Neither woman had made any move towards the other. Then Zoë arrived one morning. Jasper was in the kitchen, eating breakfast cooked by Alice. Dorothy Mellings was on the telephone in the sitting room, having taken herself well out of the way of Jasper, as Alice appreciated.

  Zoë went into the sitting room, looking through Alice, who was doing the flowers for her mother. She stood in the middle of the room, gazing dramatically at Dorothy. Who took her time ending the telephone conversation, in order—as both Alice and Zoë could see—to prepare herself for the confrontation with Zoë. A confrontation it was going to have to be—Zoë’s face and body said so. It was evident to Alice that Zoë had come to provoke a quarrel. She wanted some kind of noisy showdown with Dorothy; there was something self-consciously accusing about her. She had prepared all kinds of things to say and how to say them.