The Good Terrorist

The two men came back on Sunday night. Alice knew at once they had failed. Jasper had a limp look, and Bert was morose even before he read the letter Pat had left for him.

She made supper for Jasper, who at once went up to his sleeping bag on the top floor. Bert said he was tired, but she followed him, and found him standing alone in the room he had shared with Pat. She went in and, though he was not thinking of Ireland, said, "I want to ask some questions. Jasper's sometimes funny when he has had a disappointment."

"So am I," said Bert, but softened and, standing where he was, hands dangling down, said, "We didn't get anywhere."

"Yes, but why?"

She was thinking that rejection brought out the best in Bert. Without his easy affability, the constant gleam of his white teeth amid red lips and dark beard, he seemed sober and responsible.

He shook his head, said, "How do I know? We were simply told no."

She was not going to leave until he told her everything, and at last he did go on, while she listened carefully, to make a picture for herself that she could trust.

"Jack," in Dublin, had been to bars and meeting places, had made enquiries, had met this man and then that, reporting back to Bert and Jasper that things were going on as they should. Then Bert and Jasper - but not Jack, a fact that had to give her food for thought - met a certain comrade in a certain private house in a suburb. There they had been questioned for a long time, in a way that - Alice could see, watching Bert's face as he recited the tale-had not just impressed but sobered the two. Frightened them, judged Alice, pleased this had been so, for she did feel that Jasper was sometimes a bit too casual about things.

Towards the end of this encounter, or interview, a second man had come in, and sat without saying a word, listening. Bert said with a short laugh and a shake of the head, "He was a bit of a character, that one. Wouldn't like to get across him."

At last, the man who had done all the talking said that while he, speaking for the IRA, was grateful for the support offered, they - Bert and Jasper - must realise that the IRA did not operate like an ordinary political organisation, and recruitment was done very carefully, and to specific requirements.

Jasper had cut in to say that of course he understood this: "Everyone did."

Then the comrade had repeated, word for word, what he had just said. He went on to say that it was helpful to the Republican cause to have allies and supporters in the oppressing country itself, and that Jasper, Bert, "and your friends" could play a useful part, changing public opinion, providing information. They could be supplied, for instance, with pamphlets and leaflets.

Jasper had apparently become excited and expostulatory, and made a long speech about fascist imperialism. To this speech both men, the talking man and the silent one, listened without comment, and without expression.

Then the silent man simply walked out of the room, with a nod and a smile. The smile apparently had impressed Bert and Jasper. "He did smile, in the end," Bert repeated, with the ruefulness that was the note, or tone, of his account. You could even say that Bert was embarrassed. For him and for Jasper? For Jasper? Alice hoped it was not on account of Jasper, though, clearly, to make that emotional speech had not been too clever.

Alice would have liked to go on, but Bert said, "Look, I've had enough for today. This business with Pat..."

"I'm sorry," said Alice. "And I know she is."

"Thanks," he said, dryly, "oh, thanks!," and began stripping off his jersey, as though she were already gone.

Alice decided to sleep in the sitting room again, because to choose herself a room would be a final separation. Just as she was settling in, Jim appeared. He had spent the weekend jubilantly with friends. These were friends not seen for a long time, visited now because there was something to celebrate. She saw that already, after only three days, there was an alertness and competence coming into Jim; he had been dulled and slowed by unemployment. Well - of course! - everyone knew that, but to see the results so soon...

Delighted about Jim, apprehensive for Jasper, Alice lay for a long time awake in the silent room. On this side of the house the traffic from the main road could not be heard.

She knew that neither Jasper nor Bert would be up early, but made herself get up in time to join Jim for tea and cornflakes. She thought she was rather like a mother, making sure a child had eaten before going off to school, and did not scruple to say, "Are you sure you've had enough? There's no canteen there, you know. You'd better take some sandwiches." And he, like a son with an indulged mother, "Don't worry, Alice. I'm all right." Then in came Philip, and the question of the new water tank was discussed. Rather, a good second-hand one. Did Alice have any idea what a new one would cost? No, but she could guess! Philip would go this morning to his source for such things, talk it over; if one was available, did she want him to buy it, and if so, did she have the money? She empowered him to get the tank, the section of drainpipe, the guttering. Quickly in and out of the sitting room, she slid three hundred pounds from out of her sleeping bag, not wanting Philip to know how much was there - but only because she did not want anyone to know. A disconcerting, even shameful thought had taken possession. It was that when this final list of necessities had been bought, she should put some money into the post office. For herself. Money no one should know about. She should have, surely, a little put away? Yes, she would open a new post-office account, and not tell Jasper.

Philip and Jim were out. Roberta and Faye were asleep or at their women's place. Mary and Reggie had gone away for a long weekend, and would not be back until evening. Bert and Jasper slept, or were very silent, in their respective rooms. Alice sat on at the end of the table, in the quiet kitchen. The cat, absent for days, reappeared on the window sill, was let in, accepted cornflakes and milk, carefully licked up every little smear from the dish, miaowed, and went away again.

Alice was full of woe. This business of the IRA had been Jasper's impetus for months. Long before the dramatic exit from her mother's, it had been the IRA... the IRA... every day. She had not at first taken it seriously. But then had had to. Now all that had collapsed. Distributing pamphlets and leaflets was not going to satisfy Jasper. Nor, she was sure, Bert, whom she had seen yesterday for the first time as a potentially responsible comrade. Never once had it crossed Jasper's or Bert's mind that they might be refused. Would not be found good enough. The IRA had not taken Jasper and Bert seriously? Making herself examine this thought, slowly and properly turning it around in her mind, re-creating the scene she could see so vividly of Jasper and Bert with the two IRA, she had to admit that Jasper and Bert had made a bad impression. Well, it could happen! It did happen, with Jasper, all the time.

Another possibility was that they, Jasper and Bert and the others - herself included - would be tested. Yes, that could be it. An eye would be kept on them, without their knowing. (Comrade Andrew here appeared powerfully before Alice, and she smiled at the image.) But certainly Jasper and Bert had not thought this; and the Irish comrades had not given them anything specific to do.

This meant - Alice faced it - a bad few days with Jasper. She would not be seeing much of him. He would be gone from here, perhaps returning briefly at night for some food, then off again. Once, in a very bad patch, Jasper had been like that for weeks, over a month, and she had lived in terror for the knock of the police at the door, and news about Jasper she had been dreading since she had first met him. When he was like that, he was not careful about much.

The only hope was his link with Bert. Steadying. Bert might save the situation without ever knowing that one existed.

A couple of hours passed, her spirits sinking lower, and then Philip came in, pleased, to say that his chum at the yard, with contacts where demolition work was going on, had all that 43 needed, and it was in a van outside. But Philip had spent the three hundred pounds and needed money to pay for delivery. Just as he was saying all this, while he and she crossed the hall, Jasper appeared, running lightly down the stairs. Alice stood still to watch him, her heart lifting. She always forgot, when she had not seen him for some time, how he affected her. That lightness of his - each step as though he might take off altogether! - and then how he stood there, at the foot of the stairs, straight and slender; you'd think he was from another world, he was so pale and fine, with his glistening cropped hair.... But he was scowling most horribly. Under his gaze she had to go to the sitting room where she had slept, while he knew why she went and knelt by the sleeping bag, which was only just out of his line of sight. She was risking that he might come in; and she had the disconnected, breathless, out-of-control feeling that was fatal with Jasper. He would realise she had come here for money. What was she to do? She quickly thrust what remained of the one package, together with the fat whole package, down her shirt, where it was visible. She put on a jacket, though he would know why she had the jacket on, and went out under his cold, furious, dissecting gaze. Bert had appeared on the stairs, looking tired and demoralised. What a contrast, Jasper and Bert: one like an avenging angel - the thought came compulsively into her mind - the other so brought down and weakened.

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, watch- ing 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 whole 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 forgotten 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."

Now he did look at Alice, and was able to sustain the look, though it was evident it was a strain, keeping his eyes on his daughter's eyes; he simply did not understand what he was seeing.

"I suppose it is no good asking you to return the money?" he almost pleaded.

At this Alice laughed. The laugh acknowledged, even admiringly, some sort of necessity that Cedric, poor fool, could not begin to understand. He, however, nodded, having understood. He said, "I suppose that Jasper of yours has already got it. Well, I know it is no use saying anything to you about him. You have a blind spot of some kind. But you must understand this: you are not having any more money from me. I see no reason why I should support that - well, let that go. I am very pushed for money, Alice-do you understand that? And it's not just this thousand. A few days ago, some hooligan or other walked into our bedroom, mine and Jane's - and lifted..." Suddenly, as the thought struck him, he jerked back in his chair as if he had been given a minor electric shock and stared at Alice, his jaw literally dropping. Until this moment, that theft had not been connected with Alice. She merely smiled, admitting nothing, but knowing that she need not bother with denials.

Again he had been shocked to the heart, could not speak, sat struggling to order his thoughts. He was breathing shallowly, in quick gasps. Then he fumbled for a cigarette, lit it clumsily, and sat drawing in smoke as if it were a narcotic.

At last he said, "Alice, I don't know.... Now you are a thief? Is that it? Is that how you live? I don't understand." Putting out the cigarette again, as though stubbing Alice out of existence, he said, "I thought it was some hooligan, these kids who come into a house on an impulse...." It was at this point that the next thought hit him, and again he sat staring. "Was that you?" he asked blankly; "did you throw that stone?" He knew it was; this was not a question.

He said, "That stone missed little Deborah by six inches. There was glass everywhere - Jane got a splinter in her leg...."

He shook his head, like a dog with pain in its ears. He was shaking Alice off - forever.

"You are, of course, quite right in your calculations," he said. "You worked it all out. You decided I would not go to the police, because you are my daughter. I won't this time. But next time I shall. As far as I am concerned, you've become some sort of wild animal. You are beyond ordinary judgement."

Alice stood up. She did not feel pain at this casting off; she felt that she had been cast off, abandoned, long ago.

She said, "What is my mother's address?"

This query took some time to reach Cedric. He had to give himself time to let the thought reach him. He said, "Have you lost her address, then?"

"I never had it. She just left, didn't she? Just left our house, just abandoned it." Alice's voice was all furious accusation.

"What are you talking about? She's been going to move for months."

"Because you won't support her," she shrieked.

"Because I won't support bums like you and Jasper."

"Well, what is her address?"

"Find it out yourself. The next thing, I suppose, you'll be stealing from poor Dorothy and throwing stones through her windows."

But this came out in a stumbling, heavy voice; he still could hardly believe it all.

Alice went out of his office and along a passage to the general office at the end. To the girl there in charge of the files, she said: "What is my mother's address? Dorothy Mellings, what is her address?" This girl had, of course, not been told of the scandal of the boss's daughter, and she willingly went to the tall cabinet, found the card, read it to Alice, who memorised it and ran out. She passed Jill, who stared at her, almost pleadingly, as if Alice were a murderer, or thug, who could attack her.

Alice ran through the stationer's, where idiots bought magazines about gracious living, romantic or adventure novels, and pretty cards saying "For a Special Friend,"

"Love on Your Birthday," or "I'm thinking of You." Or boxes of letter paper with daffodils or roses on them. Or... just shit and rubbish.

Alice went to a cafe in Finchley Road, and sat for a long time quietly by herself over strong coffee. She needed to think.

She decided that the link with Bert was unlikely to hold Jasper back from one of his binges; that she would have to sit it out; that Bert was almost certainly going after Pat; that the best thing she could do was to organise a Congress of the CCU for as soon as possible. The work for this would foment in the house the right kind of feeling, atmosphere, to do away with the nastiness of the last day or so. She had just saved the situation with Jim. But Philip, a gentle and even timid soul, would leave if something were not done.

When she got home, the door into Jim's room was open, and all his things gone.

This really did hit her, hard. She wailed, standing there, looking in at the room that had nothing left of him. Not his musical instruments - drums, guitar, accordion; not his sleeping bag, or his clothes, or his record player... nothing. Jim had been blown out of this room as though he had never been.

She did not have any addresses of friends, or family.

She stood at the open door, fists up on either side of her head, banging it, banging it hard, and wailing, "No, no, no, oh no..."

Feet running down the stairs; Faye stood there, indignant, outraged: "Whatever is the matter?" she called.

"Jim - he's gone, he's gone."

"Good riddance," said Faye, smartly, laughing. "We didn't want him anyway."

Looking up, Alice could see, above Faye, Philip, whose face said that he heard this, as - no doubt - Faye wanted him to. But she saw, too, Roberta, who came swiftly to Faye, and seized her two arms, and pulled her back out of sight. Roberta's face was grave and shocked - hurt because of Faye.

Roberta's low urgent voice; Faye's tittering, high laugh. A door slammed. Roberta came running down, grasped Alice, stood rocking the sobbing girl: "There, there, there..."

"It's my fault," sobbed Alice. "Mine. I did it. It's because of me."

"There, there, there. Never mind."

She took Alice to the sitting room and made her get inside the sleeping bag. She fetched her a tumbler of whisky, bade her drink, sleep, forget it.

Hysterical Alice, like the so-often hysterical Faye, was being doped into harmlessness.