The Good Terrorist

Alice spent the morning over the death certificate and the afternoon going through Philip's possessions, with the official. It was an awful, painful business. Philip owned a few clothes, and about five hundred pounds in the post office, which would go to pay for his funeral.

As for his ladders and equipment, Alice said nothing about them, so they, at least, would not be sold to some dealer for a tenth of their value. They - in number 43 - now at least owned their own ladders, trestles, and tools. For what that was worth; for as long as that was worth anything.

Because of Alice's preoccupation with the disposition of Philip, the household marked time. Rather, all did save Jocelin, who was at work in an upstairs room on a variety of devices that she was concocting out of the books she referred to as "recipe books," which gave admirable and concise advice about making explosive devices. She had purloined some of the materiel on its way through number 45. Alice, with the others, saw these devices, on Jocelin's invitation. They were ranged on one of Philip's trestles in a locked room-locked because of Mary and Reggie, who, though moving out in a few days, were not yet gone. What struck Alice about the things Jocelin had made was that they looked so unimportant and even flimsy, were mere assemblages of bits of this and that. Electronic devices that Jocelin was clearly proud of seemed no more portentous than those fragments of minuscule circuitry that appear when the insides of a transistor radio are broken apart.

There were also paper clips, drawing pins, a couple of cheap watches, bits of wire, household chemicals, copper tubing of various sizes, ball bearings, tin tacks, packets of plastic explosive, old-fashioned dynamite, reels of thick cotton, string.

While Jocelin worked with relish ("enjoyment" was not a word for Jocelin) at these little toys, and Alice wept over Philip - for she felt now as if she had lost an old friend, even a brother - Jasper and Bert went to some demonstrations, admonished by the others on no account to get themselves arrested, for there was important work to be done; and Roberta took Faye to stay with a friend at Brighton, because the sea air would do Faye some good. Roberta's mother was still in a coma.

A day passed slowly. The house seemed empty. Alice found herself thinking that Roberta and Faye probably would be back that night. Would they like to be welcomed by a real meal, even a feast? While she worried about this, sitting in the kitchen with the cat, Caroline came in with carrier bags full of food. She was smooth and sleek with pleasure; she said she felt like cooking a real meal; no, Alice must sit where she was and for once allow herself to be waited on.

Until then only Alice had brought in food. Real food, that is, not a pizza or some portions of chips. Only Alice had trudged in with loads of fruit, of vegetables, had stacked the refrigerator with butter and milk, piled a cupboard with pastas and pulses. Now she sat gratefully watching Caroline, who worked smiling, full of a rich secret contentment that seemed to spill out over her, like candlelight. Alice felt meagre, dry; she did these things, cooked and fed and nurtured, but it was out of having to, a duty. She had never in her life felt what she saw brimming over in Caroline, who, as she licked a spoon to test a sauce, looked at Alice over it as though she were sharing some pleasure with her that only the rare, the initiated, of the world could even suspect. And then she lifted a spoon over to Alice, carefully, guarding - it seemed - some essence or distillation, and watched, her eyes glistening, as Alice tasted and said, "Yes, fantastic, wonderful."

"I am a great cook," sang or purred Caroline. "This is what I ought to be doing...." And, because she was reminded of what she was doing, how employed, a bleakness came over her for a moment, and she was silent.

She told Alice her history. A good daughter of the middle classes, as she described herself, she saw the light - that is, that the System was rotten and needed a radical overthrow - when she was eighteen. She was in love with a young Che Guevara from the LSE, but he turned respectable on her and settled for the Labour Party. Nevertheless, he was the love of her life. When she visited him - "Absolute anguish, my dear, why do I do it?" - she knew that this was the man for her. "But how could I live like that? I couldn't! One weekend is enough. Then we weep, we quarrel, and we part. Until next time." So she chattered, becoming flushed, seeming to loosen and soften from the heat in the kitchen, flour on her cheek, sleeves rolled up, her large white hands in control of everything. She looked plump, soft, content, full of secret and unscrupulous satisfactions.

Jasper and Bert came back, ready for hot baths and food. They had gone down to Nottingham to join the pickets in a miners' strike. It had rained and was cold. Roberta and Faye were starving, they said when they returned. Faye had colour in her cheeks again; she had rejoined the living, and was amusingly and enliveningly her cockney self. Roberta, so happy that her love was better, showed a side of herself they had not seen. She sang, very well, in a full, controlled contralto, first some workers' songs, then a whole range of songs from the Portuguese, from Spanish, from Russian. It turned out that she had been trained to sing, but she had found her niche with the revolution.

There was enough wine, and everyone got tight. Mary and Reggie did not appear.

They were all going up to bed, at about two in the morning, when there was a low, hurried knock at the front door.

"My God, the police," shrieked Alice and rushed to confront them. But it was not the police. Two young men shouldering large packages stood there, smiling, bent sideways from the weight.

"What's that? You can't bring those here," said Alice, knowing what was happening, all her pleasure in the evening gone, feeling chilled and apprehensive.

"Come on, now," said one, Irish as they make them. "We were told to leave these here."

"It's a mistake," said Alice.

But he had slid the package onto the hall floor and gone off, while his fellow, grinning bashfully, let his load slide off.

"You have to take them back," said Alice. "Do you understand?" They had both gone down the path, and she could see them standing by a small shabby van. They were conferring, turning to check the house number with a piece of paper. Alice arrived beside them and said, "You haven't understood. This stuff shouldn't be left here! You must take it away again."

"Ah, well now, but that's easily said," said the one who had spoken before. He sounded injured. More, afraid. He even glanced around into the shadowy gardens, and then out into the main road, where the traffic was thinner but still moving. It was a dark night, damp. The three stood close together under the street light and argued.

Alice said that this was the wrong house, and the house they wanted, number 45, was no longer safe to leave anything at.

They said that they had been told number 43.

"You have got to take them away."

"And we will not!"

She imagined that she heard a window going up behind her and turned to stare up into the darkened top of the house opposite Joan Robbins, and while she did this the two men took the opportunity to nip into the van. She had to stand aside quickly to avoid being run over.

"Oh no," she wailed into the dark, watching the little van dart off to the corner and turn out of sight. "No, it simply isn't on. It's not fair."

She stood there, helpless, feeling that things had gone out of control. Then thought that she should go in, in case any nosy neighbour was awake and interested. Slowly she went indoors. The two cartons, as smooth and bland as two brown pebbles, stood there in the hall with nothing on them to announce their contents.

On the stairs stood Jasper and Bert, staring, disconsolate. Also, rather drunk. Above them, Jocelin. Roberta and Faye had gone off into their room. Caroline was still clearing up in the kitchen.

"We can't have these here," appealed Alice, to the men, but it was Jocelin who leaped down past them, and said only, "Up into the attic." As the two women laboured up past the men on the stairs, they came to and helped. First one very heavy carton and then the other were stowed in a far corner of the attic.

Jocelin said she would find out what was there in the morning. Perhaps even tonight: she didn't feel sleepy.

"Don't blow us all up," said Jasper, and she did not reply. She did not think much of Jasper, and showed it. She seemed to like Bert, however. Bert, for his part, was attracted by Caroline, who either had not noticed this or had decided to ignore it.

Alice went back into the kitchen, tidied up this and that, listening for sounds of some or all of them coming back to talk it over. For she had understood that something bad had happened. It was not just another little harassment, like a visit from the police! When she realised that no one was coming, which meant they had not seen what by now they should, she sat down at the head of the table and lapsed into a numbed condition. Numbed feelings, not thought, for her mind was active.

No one had said anything to them about number 43's becoming a collection point. Comrade Muriel would certainly have mentioned it, had she known. Caroline and Jocelin had not expected it. Comrade Andrew had not even approached the subject. (Here the thought of the money, the five hundred pounds, presented itself, and Alice contemplated it, as it were, without prejudice.) Number 43 couldn't have people just dumping stuff here, and others whisking it off again, any time of the day or night! It simply wasn't on! But who could Alice contact to announce this? It occurred to her that she had no means of reaching Pat, or Muriel; let alone Comrade Andrew. The unreality of it, that these people had been so vivid, so there, in this house and in the next house, for weeks - comrades, you could say intimates - and then not to be there, and so absolutely gone, lost, rubbed out that she could not even send them a postcard... This thought deepened her numbness, like a blank area slowly spreading through her.

And there was another thing. (But this was certainly not a new thought.) Here they were, committed to "doing something real at last," all ready for it - you could say that number 43 was now quivering on the edge, like people in a little boat on the verge of a waterfall (here Alice painfully shook her head, like a dog clearing its ears of water) - yet they did not really have much confidence in one another. (Alice was replaying, as it were, the look on Jocelin's face as she saw that Jasper and Bert lolled on the stairs, while she, Jocelin, ran down to help carry the big packages.) No, Jocelin did not admire Jasper! What did she think of Faye? Well, it was not hard to imagine. Almost certainly, though, she must approve of Roberta? Caroline? You could hardly imagine a greater contrast between the indolent, sensual woman and the cold, functional Jocelin. And herself, Alice? Did she despise her, too?

It occurred to her that she was using Jocelin as a touchstone, a judgement point. As though Jocelin were the key to everything? Well, it was she who was at work on the bombs, or whatever.

Alice went up to the top of the house, saw that light showed beneath the door of Jocelin's workroom, knocked, heard a low "Come in."

Jocelin looked up from where she sat behind her trestle, her hands intricately engaged with a length of copper wire. Close by her stood packages of various household chemicals, looking reassuring in their bright packaging.

Jocelin went on looking at Alice, waiting for her to explain herself. She was formidable and frightening, Alice thought. Yet what could be more ordinary than Jocelin? A stranger would see a rather slatternly blonde, strands of pale hair falling over her face, smears of some sort of white powder on her old grey sweater. But it was her concentration, her focussing of herself behind what she did...

Alice said feebly, "Hello," and Jocelin did not respond, but went on working, pouring white grains from an old saucepan into a copper pipe.

"I didn't like what happened down there," said Alice, sounding ineffective even to herself, and Jocelin nodded and said, "No, neither did I. But I don't see that we can do anything but go on. We must get the job done quickly, and then scatter."

There was nowhere in the room to sit, only the trestle and behind it the stool on which Jocelin sat. Windows showed a greying sky. The birds would start soon. Alice stood in front of Jocelin like a schoolgirl in front of a teacher, and said, "Have you thought yet what we should do?"

"Yes, of course. What we blow up depends on our means, doesn't it. I've got a pretty good idea of what the capacity of these things is. But we have to discuss it."

"Have you... I mean... you've..."

"No, I haven't done this before. But it's a question of using your common sense," said Jocelin briskly. She set aside one copper tube, which was about ten inches long and presumably had reached some stage of readiness, and took up another. She nodded sideways at the "recipe book," which lay open. This production shared the same qualities as the devices made according to its recipes. It was not printed, but photographed, which gave it a technical, ugly look. It was on bad paper. It had a yellowish plastic cover, like a cheap cookery book. Everything on that trestle looked cheap, makeshift, sharpedged, and for some reason unfinished. Everything, that is, except the clever packets of chemicals, which seemed glossy with the amount of thought and expertise that had gone into them.

"And it wouldn't be a bad idea if we had a practice run," said Jocelin, smiling. It was, as might be expected, a cold, off-putting smile.

"Right on," said Alice. "Of course."

"We could choose something that deserves to be blown up."

Alice came to life with, "Yes. Something absolutely shitty... something revolting, yes."

Jocelin looked at her curiously, because of this sudden animation. "Have you anything in mind? I want something defined, if you know what I mean. Something definite, not too big; and solid. So that I can check quantities."

Alice was reviewing in her mind's eye things she would enjoy seeing blown up. She had to discard the high corrugated iron fences around the former market where everyone had had such a good time; which, all through the week, and particularly on Saturdays and Sundays, had been like a festival. A fence was not "defined." It went on and on.

"Not a telephone box," said Jocelin. "It says here exactly how much one needs to do one of those in."

"A car?"

"Yes, we might have to use a car, because of the difficulty of access. Of being seen. But I know what a car would need. Something else."

Alice smiled. "I know what." A passion of loathing had taken her over, so that she felt quite shaky with it. "Oh God, yes," she breathed. "I'll show you. It's not far."

"Right." Jocelin left her post and was beside Alice as they went silently down the stairs. The hall was not dark, but grey. Daylight. There would soon be people in the streets, the early workers.

They had only to walk half a mile, to an area of small streets that had been built before the invention of the motorcar. Now lorries trundled there all day, crunching backwards around corners, passing one another with inches to spare. The pavements, built so that two people could pass each other, were narrow, and in two of these little streets, at right angles to each other, the pavement had been widened on one side, thus further narrowing the streets by about a yard. This piece of official brilliance was dazzling enough, but in addition, to make it all totally incomprehensible to the ordinary mind, having gained this extra yard or so of pavement for the comfort and satisfaction of the citizens, the Council had then stuck all along the reclaimed edge of pavement cement stanchions or bollards of a peculiarly ugly grey-brown, about a yard tall, and round, like teeth. These hideous and pointless and obstructive objects, twenty or so around each corner at either end of the afflicted street, which Alice passed whenever she went to the Underground, provoked in her the all-too-familiar helpless rage, useless, violent, and unappeasable. She would stand there, examining this scene as she had done when seeing how the Council workmen had filled in lavatories with cement, smashed pipes, vandalised whole houses, saying to herself, People did this. First, in some office, they thought it up, and then they made a plan, and then they instructed workmen to do this, and then workmen did it. It was all incomprehensible. It was frightening, like some kind of invincible stupidity made evident and visible. Like modern university buildings.

Side by side on the pavement, which was, because of the cement teeth, as narrow as it had been before the widening, Alice and Jocelin looked at the scene. A reversing or too narrowly turning lorry had knocked one of the teeth sideways. Their bases were stained with dog urine and shit. Under the low grey dawn sky, the still-sleeping houses held the people who would be insulted by these pavements, these cement teeth, every time they came out of doors. The houses seemed tender and innocent, the sky pure and sad. Then began the dawn chorus.

Alice was weeping with rage.

Jocelin sighed, and said, "Right. I see what you mean. But this isn't an easy location. There must be people around most times of the day and night."

"There are none now."

"But there are always night owls looking out of windows, or women up with their babies."

Alice was comforted by this evidence of the ordinary in Jocelin, but said, "But that is true of everywhere, all the time, isn't it?"

Jocelin did not answer. She was looking at the knocked-askew tooth. Without guiltily glancing around, or looking along the rows of windows, she went quickly to this stanchion and tried to lift it. It moved a little. Alice joined her, and together, with difficulty, they raised it to the perpendicular and let it go again.

Swiftly, Jocelin examined the gap at the base of this tooth, where there were some thin metal wires, and said, "This will do. I'll put the charge under it. Then make it stand upright. All I want to know is how much I need to use of something. Tomorrow. We'll do it tomorrow. About an hour earlier than this."

It was getting on for five.

They had been standing there for a good ten minutes, but not a soul had appeared. Yet they were surrounded by windows and, possibly, eyes. A familiar feeling of recklessness, excitement, was stealing through Alice. Her awful lethargy had gone. The dim, grey numb feeling like a poison - gone!

And as they turned the corner to their street, she broke into a run, and sprinted, from sheer excess energy, up to their gate, and vaulted over it, and then up the path, to be brought to a halt by the door, which after all had to be opened. With a key.

Jocelin, arriving calmly, said, "One has to be very together for this job. Calm. Not excitable." Alice muttered something apologetic.

They went up to bed.

Alice did not sleep much; she was thrilling with excitement, with anticipation. Coming downstairs in a sleeping house, she made herself walk sedately, because of what Jocelin had said.

She sat in the kitchen and thought, Well, here I am again, waiting for people to wake up. She drank tea, ate wholemeal toast and honey, then remembered the packages in the attic. At once her whole self seemed afflicted with confusion, with division. What was needed was a car... but there was no car at 45.... How to get hold of a car? Checking that it wasn't too late - about eight, time to get her before she went to work - Alice walked as fast as she could to Felicity's place.

Felicity was just coming out of the gate, and when she saw Alice, wary annoyance possessed her. But Alice gave her no time to develop this. She went straight up and said, "Philip's affairs are more or less sorted out. But they are looking for his sister. If they don't find her in a couple of days, they'll fix the funeral for Monday or Tuesday anyway." Felicity, as expected and as she ought, looked embarrassed, if impatient, and said, "Thanks, it's good of you to take it on."

"I had no alternative," Alice reminded her crisply.

The two women stood facing each other, but Felicity looked as though she were in a game of trying to dodge past someone without being touched. Alice said, "Can I borrow your car for a few hours?"

At this Felicity sighed and said, "But I'm using it this morning." Felicity was a social worker.

"I need it," said Alice simply.

Felicity thought, and said, "You could have it tomorrow morning until lunchtime." She could not have said more clearly: And that is all you are getting from me as quid pro quo! Alice answered this with, "Fine. We'll consider accounts settled, then." Hearing it put into words made Felicity blush, but she said, "I'm in a hurry. Same time tomorrow?" And almost ran to her car, a Datsun, which stood parked with all the other conforming, obedient cars along the pavement's edge.

That's done, thought Alice, and put all thoughts of the dangerous packages out of her head. Tomorrow she would take them to the municipal rubbish tip, and that would be that. And if any more turned up, they would be got rid of.

Outside her front door stood a man, in a neat grey suit and a tie, so much the official that she thought, Oh no, not the Council again, and put on her competent, I-am-coping-with-everything face.

But it was in an American accent that he said, or stated, "Alice Mellings?"

"That's right" - and she knew that this forthcoming encounter was one she would need all her wits for. Her excited blood told her so.

"Can I come in?"

Without speaking, she opened the door, and went in front of him to the kitchen, and indicated that he should sit in the chair at the end of the table. She put on the kettle and sat at the head.

He looked younger than herself. But he was the type to look young. He had a smooth face, attentive and polite, like an old-fashioned student. He had rather nice brown eyes, at the moment devoted to her every movement, eyes that examined her as closely as she did him. He had well-cared-for hands. But his most remarkable feature was his featurelessness. There was nothing, but nothing, to fasten on to in him. A clerk; someone essentially indoor, weathered at the worst by a draught or too-cold air from a left-open window. He might have taken an exam in how to be ordinary! Yet there was something excessive in it.... Of course, she, Alice, was only likely to meet nonconformists - or, as her mother in her old-fashioned way put it, bohemians; and, of course, in England in these days, particularly London, no one gave a fuck, but all the same...

It was he who broke the silence with, "Comrade Mellings, I was informed early this morning that you were reluctant to accept a consignment of materiel."

Alice stared. The use of the word materiel now, in this context, was not thrilling her at all. In this situation (one she wanted to shake off and be rid of), the word materiel was too portentous; it was a word that insisted on being taken seriously.

He said, "Is that true, Comrade Mellings? I would like some kind of explanation." He spoke as it were abstractly, his own personality removed, but the words he used were enough, and she was suddenly furious. Who the fuck did he think...

"It certainly is true," she said calmly, and coldly. "It was quite out of order to bring it here. No arrangement has ever been made that any sort of stuff should be sent here." She deliberately used the word "stuff," which sounded unimportant.

He licked his lips, and his eyes were slightly narrowed as he stared.

"That is not possible," he observed, at last. But she could see he was nonplussed, was trying to find some thread or loose end to guide him in.

"Oh yes, it is," she asserted herself. "All kinds of things were dumped next door and picked up again. But that had nothing to do with us in this house. This is a quite different situation."

There were sounds from the kettle that enabled her briskly to rise and go to it. Her back to him, she stirred powdered coffee into two mugs. Slowly. Something about him bothered her. He was rather like those large, smooth, shiny bales upstairs, with not a mark on them, and with God knows what inside.

An American? Well...

She took her time in turning, in setting the mug down in front of him. She had not asked what he would drink. Then she surprised herself by yawning, a deep, irresistible yawn. After all, she had hardly slept. He glanced at her, covertly, surprised. This glance was not, as it were, on the agenda; and she felt suddenly in control.

She calmly sat down, and when he seemed to be looking about for milk, or sugar, she pushed a half-empty bottle of milk towards him, and a quite pretty old cup with sugar in it. She could see that these domestic arrangements did not meet with his approval.

She waited, her mind at work on what it was about him that disturbed her.

"The American revolutionaries depend on this liaison, so that their aid can reach the Irish revolutionaries," he said.

"What American revolutionaries?"

"As you know, Comrade Mellings, large numbers of honest Americans wish to aid the Irish in their fight against the British oppressor."

"Yes, but most of them are just ordinary people; they aren't revolutionaries." There was considerable contempt in this for him - for his inexactness.

He was now staring down at his mug, as if examining her was not yielding him the information he needed, and the mug might provide inspiration.

"Just let's get this clear," she said. "You are supposed to be an American supplying the Irish comrades with materiel?" She had not meant to sound so raw and derisive.

He said, still looking at his mug, "Yes, I am an American, Gordon O'Leary. Third-generation American. An old Irish-American family. Like the Kennedys." He laughed, for the first time. The laugh offered her this joke like a present, and he looked full at her, with confidence.

"And Comrade Andrew is an American too?" she enquired, her voice quite stifled with derision.

"Yes, he is an American. Of course. But I think his family came from Germany."

"Oh, for shit's sake," she said. "Comrade Andrew is about as American as..." She looked straight at him, with the full force of her essential innocence, her candour, and said, "And you are not an American. You couldn't be an American, not in a thousand years."

His pale, obedient cheeks coloured, and his breathing changed as he dropped his dangerously angry gaze. Regaining control, he said, "But I can assure you I am. Why shouldn't I be?"

"You are Russian. Like Andrew. Oh, you speak perfect American, of course." Alice laughed, from nervousness. But she was fuelled by the most sincere anger. She had never been able to stand being treated like a fool. She was being treated like one now.

He made some internal adjustment or other, sighed, sat up straight in his chair, as if reminded by an inward monitor that one didn't slump in a chair, and looked at her. He said, mildly enough, "Comrade Mellings, as it happens I am an American. From Michigan. I am an engineer, and when I have finished certain little assignments here, that is what I shall return to do. Do you understand?" He waited for her to reply, but while she was listening to him, her gaze fixed on his face, the gaze was a little glassy, because her mind was hard at work. Why could he not be an American? His accent was perfect, better than Andrew's! No, it was his style. It was something about him. What were Americans, then? (She even shut her eyes, allowing Americans she had known to appear in her mind's eye, for examination.) All the ones she had met - which, she reminded herself, were mostly young and belonging to the network of international wanderers and explorers but, nevertheless, real Americans - were quite different. There was a quality - what was it? Yes, there was a largeness, an openness, a looseness... there was a freedom, yes, that was the word. Whereas this man here (and she opened her eyes to make comparisons with what she had been examining on her inner screen, to see him most curiously watching her) was tight and controlled, and looked as if he couldn't make a spontaneous movement if he tried. He looked, even though he sat "relaxed" - presumably that was meant to be an informal pose - as if he wore an invisible straitjacket and had never been without it, ever, in his life. His very molecules had got into the habit of being on guard.

"You are not American," she concluded. "But I don't care anyway. You are not to bring any more of that stuff here. We won't take it in."

"You will do as you have contracted to do. As was understood," he said, very soft, very threatening. She felt this way of conveying threat had been taught to him: method 53 for intimidating the subject. The contempt she felt for his obviousness was putting her out of his reach.

"I told you, we haven't contracted for anything."

"You have! You have, Comrade Mellings!"

3°3

"When did I? It was never even mentioned. It wasn't mentioned once."

"How could it not have been mentioned? Did you or did you not accept money from us, Comrade Mellings?"

This did set her back a bit, and she frowned, but said, "I didn't ask for the money. It was simply given to me."

"It was just given to you," he said, with polite derision, mild, to match his general style.

"Yes. All I knew about it was when Comrade Muriel, you know, the woman who looks like a goose, handed me a packet with five hundred pounds, just before she went off to her spy course in Lithuania or wherever."

This time he went properly red, a raw beef red, and he did actually glare at her, before recovering himself. Again he sat himself up straight, reminded, perhaps by his anger, that even when one was sitting relaxed at a table, nevertheless one's knees should be set together and one should at the most have one elbow on it.

"If Comrade Andrew or anyone else said anything about spy schools anywhere at all, then it's just a pack of nonsense."

She thought about this, taking her time. "I don't think it was nonsense. Where have Muriel and Pat gone to? They've gone off somewhere for training. Well, I don't care anyway. I'm not interested in America or Czechoslovakia or Russia or Lithuania. None of us are. We are English revolutionaries and we shall make our own policies and act according to the English tradition. Our own tradition."

He said cautiously, after a considerable pause, "It is of course understandable that you owe first loyalty to your own situation. But we are dealing with a struggle between the growing communist forces in the world, and capitalism in its death throes. That is an international situation, which means that policies must be formulated from an international point of view. This is a world struggle, comrade."

"I don't think you quite understand," said Alice. "We are not taking orders from you or from anyone else. Not from anybody," she added.

"It's not a question," he said slowly, emphasising each word, "of what you have or have not decided, comrade. You cannot renege on agreements already made."

She completed the circular argument by repeating, "But not by us."

His violently hostile eyes were hastily shielded from her, as he lowered his gaze.

The silence went on for a time, and Alice remarked, quite in her good-hostess manner, putting people at their ease, "It seems to me that your Comrade Andrew has goofed things up. Isn't that it? And you are sorting it all out?"

She heard his breathing come too loud. Then slow and regular as he controlled it. His eyes were not available for inspection. Everything about him was tight, clenched, even his hand, where it lay on the table. "Well, don't get so uptight about it. With so many in the KGB - millions of you, aren't there? - yes, I know that is for the whole of Russia, only some of you are out keeping an eye on us - well, there are bound to be some inefficient ones." His glance upwards at her did quite frighten her for a second, and she continued bravely, even kindly, for now she genuinely wanted to set him at his ease, if possible, having won the advantage and made him accept her point of view: "I am sure the same is true of our lot. I mean, what a shitty lot, that is, if even half of what you read in the papers is true...." This last part of the sentence was her mother, straight; and Alice wondered that her mother should be speaking so authoritatively and naturally from Alice's own mouth. Not that Alice minded. Dorothy Mellings's voice sounded quite appropriate, really, in this situation. "Getting caught the way they do all the time. Well, I suppose we wouldn't be likely to hear about yours: you'd just rub them out. I mean, that's one thing about having a free press."

Now he moved his position, apparently trying to relax, though he had a fist set upright on the table in front of him. His look at her was steady, his breathing normal; some turning point had occurred in the conversation, if conversation was the word for it. Some decision had probably been taken. Well, so, that was all right. He'd go off in a moment and that would be that.

But he showed no signs of moving yet.

Well, let him sit on there, then. What she really wanted to think about was not him, or why he was here, but tonight, and the adventure that awaited her with Jocelin, with whom, at this moment, she felt an almost sisterly bond, in contrast to the murky complicated feeling she had about this Russian. This foreigner.

She remarked, "I do think that part of our problem - I mean, now, between you and me - is what is referred to as a culture clash!" Here she laughed, as Dorothy Mellings would have done. "Your traditions are so very different from ours. In this country you really cannot turn up and tell people what to do or think. It's not on. We have a democracy. We have had a democratic tradition now for so long it is in our bones," she concluded, kindly and smiling.

What was happening with him now was that he was thinking - as, after all, happens not so rarely in conversations - But this person is mad! Bonkers! Round the twist! Daft! Demented! Loco! Completely insane, poor thing. How was it I didn't see it before?

At such moments, rapid and total readjustments have to take place. For instance, the whole of a previous conversation must be reviewed in this new, unhappy light, and assessments must be made, such as that this person is really beyond it, or perhaps is showing only a rather stimulating eccentricity, which, however, is not appropriate for this particular situation.

Alice had no suspicion that any such thoughts were in his mind; she was happily afloat, all kinds of reassuring and apt phrases offering themselves to her as though off a tape coiled in her mind that she did not know was there at all. If, however, she could have seen her own face, that might have been a different matter; for the upper part of it, brows and forehead, had a worried and even slightly frantic look, as if wondering at what she was saying, while her mouth smilingly went on producing words.

"And I think that was probably Comrade Andrew's problem." (Here the scene on the bed came into her mind, and she actually gave her head a good sharp shake to get rid of it.) "He seemed to have a good deal of difficulty in understanding Western culture patterns. I hope you don't think too badly of him. I thought very highly of him."

"So you did, did you," he remarked, not enquired, in a quite good-humoured way. Everything about him said he would get up and go.

"Yes. He seemed to me a fine person. A really good human being."

"Well, I am glad to hear that," said Comrade Gordon O'Leary from Michigan or Smolensk or somewhere, who now did in fact get up, but in slow motion. Or perhaps that was how Alice saw it, for there was no doubt she was not feeling herself. Lack of sleep, that was it!

"Someone will come for the materiel tonight," he said.

"It's not here," improvised Alice smoothly. They couldn't have this Russian, this foreigner, creeping all over their house. Not with all those bombs and things upstairs. The next thing, he'd be telling them what to do with them. Giving them orders! Well, he'd never understand; he was a Russian; they had this history of authoritarianism.

"Where is it?" He whipped about on her, standing very close. She had stood up, holding on to the back of her chair. Now he didn't look smooth and clerkly and nothing. All the terror that she might reasonably have felt during the last half hour swooped down into her. She could hardly stand. He seemed enormous and dark and powerful looming over her, and his eyes were like guns.

"It's on the rubbish tip at Barstone. You know, the local rubbish dump, the municipal dump." Her knees seemed to be melting. She was cold, and wanted to shiver. She had understood, but really, that this was indeed a serious situation, and that somewhere she had gone wrong. Without meaning to. It was not her fault! But the way this man was looking at her - nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She had not known that there could be a situation where one felt helpless.

He was so angry. Ought he to be so angry? He was white, not red, a leaden white, with the effort - she supposed - of holding himself in, the effort of not hitting her. Of not killing her. She knew that was it.

She should not have said, in that casual way, "rubbish dump," that the stuff was on the rubbish tip. Yes, that had been foolish. Hasty. Perhaps even now she should say, No, I was joking, the cases are upstairs. But if she did, he would go upstairs and find Jocelin at work, and then...

She felt she might faint, or even begin to weep. She could feel tears filling her, beginning to press and exude everywhere over her body.

He said, "I am by myself. I have a car. I need someone - better, two people - to go out to this place and get the packages."

"Oh," she said, breathlessly, her voice sounding weak and silly. "I shouldn't do that. Not in full daylight. There might be people there. Rubbish vans emptying rubbish, for a start. It would be dangerous."

"It would be dangerous?" he enquired. Again she felt he might easily kill her, do something he could not stop himself from doing. "We can't have that lying around on a rubbish dump," he said.

"Why not? Have you ever seen one? It's full of all kinds of stuff. Acres of it. A couple of ordinary brown packages wouldn't be noticed much." She was beginning to feel better again, she noted.

"Two new, large, unopened packages?" he enquired, his face close to hers, eyes quite dislocated with anger.

"All the same, I'd wait till tonight."

"I'm not waiting till tonight. Get two people down here. Men. There are men in the house, aren't there?"

She said, cold, almost herself again, "I and another girl carried the cases" - she was going to say "upstairs," but caught herself in time - "to the car."

"Then two women. It doesn't matter."

"Yes, it does matter," she informed him. "Don't give us orders. Don't you understand, you can't give us orders, we aren't Russians."

Her eyes were shut, not so much because she did not feel well (in fact, she felt better) as because she could sense his hatred for her enclose her. Well, that was it, she was going to be killed. A movement, the sounds of footsteps; she opened her eyes and saw him going off. But at the door he stopped and turned and said very quietly, with an extraordinary intensity of contempt, of personal dislike, "Don't imagine that this is the end of it, Comrade Mellings. It is not the end, far from it. You can't play little games with us like that, you'll see, Comrade Mellings." And his face convulsed briefly, in that movement of cheeks and tongue which if continued would have ended in the action of spitting. And he stood with eyes narrowed, staring at her, determined to mark her, force her down, with the strength of what he felt.

And now this was the man himself, absolutely what he was. She knew this, knew she saw him. This was not the smoothie, the conforming spy who had been taught to control every movement, gesture, look; but something behind that. This was power. Not fantasies about power, little games with it, envy of it, but power itself. He embodied the certitudes of strength, of being utterly and completely in the right. He knew himself to be superior, dominant, in control. Above all, in the right.

He went out, shutting the door - she noted - gently. No loud bangs that might alert neighbours.

She went swiftly to the sink and was sick.

Tidily she swirled away all that nastiness, scrubbing and cleaning, though she had to hold on with one hand, her knees were so weak. She took herself, actually staggering, to the lavatory, for terror, it seemed, sat in her bowels. She came back, holding on to door edges and door handles, to the kitchen, where she collapsed on the table, face down, arms sprawled out, limp as a rag. She had never before felt anything like this physical weakness. She lay there for perhaps half an hour, while strength slowly returned.

Then Jocelin came in, hardly glanced at her - so she couldn't be so obviously in a ruinous state - and said that she must have strong coffee: not sleeping did not suit her. If she started now, she was sure she could get ready the appropriate explosive device for their work tonight. She spoke in an abstracted way, but with the cold relish that was her way of showing the excitement that, Alice knew, would shortly again be restoring herself. To hasten the healing process, she went up with Jocelin to her workroom, taking a chair with her this time, and watched those careful, intelligent hands at work. And soon she did feel so much better she had almost forgotten Comrade Gordon O'Leary. She thought vaguely: We'll have to decide about whether to take those packages to the rubbish tip or not. As things are, he'll believe they have already been found and taken off somewhere. So far behind her now did her real terror seem that she actually thought: Well, that'll give him a bad moment or two. Serve him right. She told Jocelin about him as if he had been some sort of importunate salesman she had sent packing.

"Who the hell do they think they are?" Jocelin agreed.

Their elation began to fill the whole house, like the aromas of one of Alice's soups, and for a while they were all up there, watching Jocelin at work, joking about how they would like to use this bomb or that. Tower blocks of flats. Police-computer information storage. Any information storage systems, for that matter. Certain housing estates. Any nuclear shelters that had been built anywhere, for it was only the rich who would benefit from them. Nuclear power stations.

This game got wilder and noisier, until Caroline pointed out that Reggie and Mary would be in soon. Jocelin was left to her work, and the others dispersed about the house, but kept meeting on landings, or in the kitchen, for today it was hard not to be in one another's company, to share this tide of excitement, of power.

Everything went well that night, which was a Thursday. Reggie and Mary came in long enough to collect a few things; they were off for the weekend. A stroke of luck: it meant they could all spend that evening together. They gathered in the kitchen, laughing, joking, as if they were drunk. But no one drank. And Jocelin was quiet, self-absorbed, set apart from them by the necessities of her task.

She decided that it would be better if there were three in all, not two, because of lifting that heavy cement post. They competed for the honour, and Jocelin chose Bert. Faye was disappointed, and a little bitchy. Roberta said, "Never mind, there'll be other times."

At a quarter to four, Jocelin, Bert, and Alice quietly left the house. All the windows in the little street were dark. In the main road the lamps seemed to be withdrawing light back into themselves; their yellow was thickening as a cool abstract grey stole into the sky. Along the pavements between the lamps it was dark. Low down in front of them this darkness agitated itself, and became a small black-and-white dog, trotting with a modest and thoughtful air from somewhere to somewhere. There were no people in this street, and no one in the little street where they had to do their work. The whole business took a minute, with Alice and Bert heaving up the bollard, and Jocelin placing the bomb under it. The bollard stayed upright. They did not run off, but walked slowly to a corner, then walked fast. Some minutes after they reached home, and were in the kitchen drinking chocolate, they heard the thud of the bomb. It was louder than they expected.

They sat around, not joking now, but tense, even irritable, longing to go and see, but Bert said that criminals always tried to visit the scene of the crime and the police counted on that.

Jocelin actually went off to bed. Then so did Faye and Roberta. The others could not. At about nine Caroline strolled down, through busy streets, found the area roped off with red and yellow tapes "like a street fair," she said, and the police all over the place. There seemed to be quite a bit of damage. Windows blown in, for instance. They woke Jocelin to tell her this. She was upset; she had intended to fragment the bollard and a certain area of the pavement. She, too, went down to look, and came back gloomy. Her calculations had not been correct. She returned to her workroom, saying she wanted to be alone to think.

Alice remembered that this morning was when she had the car to dispose of the bales, or packages. She was bad-tempered, and even bitter: that she should have to deal with this, on such a morning, on a day when surely she should be allowed to be with the others, without problems!

They discussed it. Should they go out now, mid-morning, and find some place to dump the packages? Caroline said lazily that they shouldn't bother - everyone would be gone from the house quite soon anyway. Let the next lot of squatters deal with the problem.

Bert and Jasper said no. Alice, reluctantly, agreed.

The four got the packages down out of the attic, with difficulty, and much bumping. The noise brought Jocelin out. She said she wanted to see what was in there; after all, it might come in useful. The bands of plastic webbing were easily cut. The wrappings were of thick waxed paper. Under that, a heavy cardboard. Inside, thick wads of coarse oily wool-waste. Within this nest were parts of guns. The five conspirators were bent over the opened package, staring in. Their hearts thudded, and their eyes dazzled. They straightened themselves, slowly, to breathe more easily. Caroline's hand, which was resting on the package's edge, was shaking, and she quickly removed it. The five of them stood there upright around the half-buried gun parts, which gleamed dully in the inadequate light. Their breathing rasped and sighed, and they heard one another swallow, and Bert said, laughing, "You'd think we were scared shitless - and I believe I am. Suddenly, it's all for real...." They all laughed, except for Alice, who was standing with both hands loosely fisted, covering her half-open mouth. Her eyes stared tragically over her knuckles at Jocelin. Jocelin gave her an impatient look and said, "Come on, let's get moving," and started to push back the packaging.

"No!" shouted Jasper, coming to life. In a fury of energy he began removing parts of guns, and assembling them as he thought they should go, working on top of the other parts still half buried in the waste.

"No," said Jocelin, cold and quiet - much to Alice's relief; and she chimed in with, "No, Jasper, don't."

Bert was already trying to help Jasper, but he was slow and clumsy compared with him.

Although Jasper was so neatly and competently sliding the parts together, taking them apart, trying other ways to fit them, he was not achieving anything like a complete weapon.

"Are they machine guns?" asked Alice, almost weeping.

"Stop it," said Jocelin directly to Jasper. "If you did manage to assemble one, what would you do with it?"

"Oh, we'll find a use for it, all right," said Bert, all his white teeth gleaming, trying hard to be as skilful as Jasper, who had nearly got together a black, shining, sinister-looking thing that was like the weapons you see in children's space films.

"Now you've got fingerprints all over it," said Jocelin, with such contempt that first Bert and then Jasper let go the guns and fell back. "Stupid fool," said Jocelin, her cold eyes demolishing Jasper, showing exactly what she really did think of him. "You fool. What do you think you are going to do? Have them just lying around, I suppose, in case one of them came in handy for some little job or other?" She pushed the two men back with her elbows, and began work herself. First she swiftly and cleverly pulled apart the half-assembled weapons (showing them all that she knew exactly what she was doing, she was familiar with them) and then took up handfuls of the waste, with which she cleaned off the fingerprints, holding the parts carefully with fingers gloved in waste.

Caroline remarked, "Probably just rubbing the marks off like that won't be much good - not with the methods they use these days."

"Probably not," said Jocelin, "but it's too late to think of that now, isn't it? We've got to get rid of these things - just get rid of them."

"Why don't we bury them in the garden?" suggested Bert, sounding like a deprived small boy, and she said, "In this garden, I suppose you mean, what a brilliant idea!" And then, as she snuggled back the gun parts into their nest, she said, "If you have in mind any little jobs that actually have to be done, something concrete - that is, within a proper context, properly organised - then weapons are available. Surely you know that?"

Bert was looking at her with resentment, but also with admiration that relinquished to her the right to take command. His eyes burned with excitement, and he could not stop smiling: teeth, eyes, his red lips, flashed and shone.

Jasper was containing himself, eyes shielded by his lids, so as not to show how furious he was - which Alice knew him to be. She was seeing Jasper, Bert as she had not done before - soldiers, real soldiers, in a war. She was thinking, Why, they'd love it, particularly Jasper. He'd enjoy every minute of it.... This thought made her even more dismayed, and she took a few steps back from the scene, the knuckles of both hands again at her mouth.

Jocelin was taking in her condition very well, despite her pre- occupation with closing up the package. "Alice, have you never seen guns before?"

"No."

"You are overreacting."

"Yes, she is," said Jasper at once, coming to life in open fury at Alice. "Look at her, you'd think she'd seen a ghost." And here he became, suddenly, like a child in a playground trying to scare another. "Woooo-o-o," he wailed, flapping his hands at her, "Alice has seen a ghost...."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," shouted Jocelin, losing her temper. "We've got a serious job to do - remember? And I'm going back up to work. Take those cases out somewhere and dump them and forget about them. They're nothing but trouble." With which she went upstairs, in her slow, determined way, not looking back at them. She was - they knew - furious with herself for losing control.

They all watched her, silent, till she was out of sight, and the atmosphere eased.

"Come on, let's get going," said Bert.

Indecision. With Jocelin, the real boss of the scene, absent, for a moment no one could act. Then Alice came to life, saying, "I'll go and get the car." She ran off.

The car keys had been left downstairs with Felicity's neighbour, because - she said crossly, demonstrating Felicity's annoyance for her - Felicity had waited for Alice to arrive when she had said she would. Apologies and smiles. Alice drove the car back to number 43. The four of them got the packages out to the car. No wonder they were so heavy.

They stood around debating where to take the packages. The rubbish dump? No, not at that hour of the day. Down to the river? No, they would be observed. Better drive out to some leafy suburb like Wimbledon or Greenwich, and see what they could find. They were on their way through Chiswick, crawling through heavy traffic, when they saw, in a side street, big corrugated iron gates and the sign: "Warwick & Sons, Scrap Metal Merchants." They turned out of the traffic and round the block and past the gates. The place seemed deserted. Alice double-parked while Bert went in, coolly, 3*4 like a customer, and hung about for a bit. But no one came. He sprinted back, face flushed, eyes reddened, white teeth and red lips flashing in his black beard. Jasper caught the fever at once. Alice, admiring them both, backed the car between the great gates and stopped. It was a large yard. In this part of London, capacious plots of ground accommodated large houses and big gardens. But this place had some ramshackle brick-and-corrugated-iron sheds at the back with heavy locks on them, and otherwise everywhere were heaps of metal pipes, bits of cars, rusting iron bars, bent and torn corrugated iron. Brass and copper gleamed unexpectedly, and stacks of milky plastic roofing showed that these merchants dealt in more than metal. There were ancient beams piled near the gates, oak from the look of them (two of these would be just the thing for the roof of poor 43) and, all around these beams, an area where every kind of rubbish had found a place, including a lot of cardboard cartons, rapidly disintegrating, that had in them more metal, and plastic bottles, plastic cups. This was it. Jasper and Caroline were out of the car in a moment, and they and Bert wrestled the packages out of the car, and let them fall near the pile of beams. Alice's eyes seemed to be bursting; black waves beat through her. But she had to keep the car running. Through her fever she saw how Bert had already stood up, looking around, the job done; how Caroline had come back to the car, was getting in; while Jasper, deadly, swift, efficient, was rubbing soil into the smooth professional surfaces of the packages, and scarring them with a bit of iron he had snatched up from a heap, working in a fury of precise intention and achievement. That was Jasper! Alice thought, proud of him, her pride singing through her. No one who had not seen Jasper like this, at such a moment, could have any idea! Why, beside him Bert was a peasant, slowly coming to himself and seeing what Jasper was doing, and then joining in when Jasper had virtually finished the job. Those two packages did not look anything like the sleek brown monsters of a few minutes before, were already just like all the other rubbish lying around, would easily be overlooked.

Jasper and Bert flung themselves in and Alice drove off. As far as they knew, no one had seen them.

They drove back towards the centre of London, and into a pub at Shepherds' Bush. It was about half past twelve. They positioned themselves where they could see the television, and sat drinking and eating. They were ravenous, all of them. There was nothing on the news, and the minute it was over, they left the pub and went home. They were all still hungry, and ready to drop with sleep. They bought a lot more take-away and ate it round the kitchen table with Faye, with Roberta, with Jocelin. There was a feeling of anticlimax. But they did not want to part; they needed one another, and to be together. They began drinking. Jasper and Bert, Alice and Caroline went off for a couple of hours' sleep, at different times, but all felt, when alone in their rooms, a strong pull from the others to come back down. They drank steadily through the evening and then the night, not elated now but, rather, depressed. Not that they confessed it; though Faye was tearful, once or twice.

As soon as the Underground was open, Jasper sprinted off to get the newspapers. He came back with them all, from the Times to the Sun. The kitchen was suddenly flapping with sheets of newsprint, which were turning more and more wildly.

There was nothing there about their exploit! Not a word. They were furious. At last Faye found a little paragraph in the Guardian that said some hooligans had blown up the corner of a street in West Rowan Road, Bilstead.

"Hooligans," said Jocelin, cold and deadly and punishing, her eyes glinting. And she did not say - and there was no need, for it was in all their minds - We'll show them.

And so they went to bed. Saturday morning. Six o'clock.