The Good Terrorist

They slept through the day, and woke with that pleasantly abstracted feeling that comes after going without sleep and then enjoying long, restoring sleep.

They discussed what was to be the scene of their next attempt. Various possibilities, but Jocelin said she needed more time to be sure of her means. Besides, Alice said, Philip would probably be buried on Monday or Tuesday; they should get that over first. She knew, from the silence that followed, from how they did not look at her - at least, not at once - that it had occurred to no one to go to Philip's funeral. She said in the polite, indifferent voice she used at her most hurt, most betrayed, "I am going, if no one else is." Jasper knew that voice, and said that he would go with her. He was pleased and even bashful, like a boy, at the grateful look she gave him. Faye said she loathed funerals, had never been to one. When people were dead, they were dead, she said. Caroline pointed out she had scarcely known Philip. Jocelin agreed.

Somebody going out to buy cigarettes came back with the local Advertiser - the sheets given away on the streets or put through letter boxes or under doors. In it they found this piece:

"Oh, poor old thing," quavered Alice. She did not look at Jocelin, for she knew the look would be reproachful.

"Silly old cow," said Faye. "Pity we didn't do her in properly. We'd have done 'er a favour, we would. These old crones, their life isn't worth living. 'Alf dead with boredom, they are, years before they go."

They decided to laugh, to placate her. Faye was in the grip of one of her violent, reminiscent moods - but provoked by what?

They never knew. She only sat and trembled a little defiantly, not looking at them, not looking even at Roberta, who was sitting rather hunched, her silvered poll lowered, eyes down, suffering for her.

"Well," said Jocelin, "I think I know what to do. I'll get it right this time."

She sounded angry, even bitter. They were all bitter with frustration. A paragraph in the local Advertiser! They felt it was a snub of them, another in a long series of belittlings of what they really were, of their real capacities, that had begun - like Faye's violences - so long ago they could not remember. They were murderous with the need to impose themselves, prove their power.

They went on drinking. Alice was sober, as usual, and apprehensive. It was Saturday, after all. And at eleven o'clock, as she had half expected, there was a loud knocking at the front door. She was up at once, sliding out of her seat, and at the kitchen door before the others had come to. She said to Jasper, "Keep out of sight, d'you hear? Don't you come out, don't...." To Bert, "Keep Jasper here. Don't let him come out." To Jocelin, "Is there anything they can find?" Jocelin ran past her and up the stairs. "It's that little fascist. I knew he'd come back. He's come to pay us back. I knew he would."

The knocking went on. She opened the door, saying crisply, using all her resources to be in command, to be Miss Mellings, "You'll wake everyone in the street."

It was he, the fair, vicious young man, with cold baby eyes, the fluffy moustache. He was grinning and sadistic. He held something behind him, and there was a disgusting smell.

Alice had some idea of what was coming, knew that nothing could be done to stop him. But the main thing was that Jasper should not come out, not in the mood he was in - there would be a fight, she knew it.

Behind the policeman stood another. Both had schoolboy sniggers on their faces; neither looked at Alice - a bad sign.

She said, "What do you want?"

"It's what you want," said the little pig, and at this he and his colleague both guffawed, actually holding their hands to their mouths, like stage comedians.

"It's what you fancy," said the second policeman, in a strong Scottish accent.

"A little of what you fancy does you good," said Alice's enemy. Oh, how she loathed him, how she knew him, through and through! Oh, she knew what went on in police cells when he had someone helpless and at his mercy. But it mustn't be Jasper.

To provoke him, to draw his fire, she allowed herself to say in a weak, quavering girlish voice, "Oh, please, please go away...." It was enough. It was just right.

"This is what you like, isn't it?" guffawed the little fascist, and flung, in a strong underarm action, a filled plastic bag into the hall.

"Shit to shit," said the other.

The smell filled the hall, filled the house, as they ran away, laughing.

Of course, it was everywhere, had splashed all over the place.

The main thing was, Jasper had stayed inside.

Stepping delicately, she went to the kitchen door, said, "If I were you I'd stay exactly where you are."

But they did not, appeared in a noisy, raging group, full of imprecations and threats. Jasper would go up to the police station now. He would kill that fascist. He would burn down the police station. He would blow the place up.

Faye was retching into the kitchen sink, aided by Roberta. Jocelin appeared on the landing, stood looking down, like a figure of Judgement or something, thought Alice, sick of them all. She knew who was going to clear up.

"Shut up," she said. "You don't understand. This is good, it isn't bad. He was going to get his own back for being made to look a fool the other day. We are lucky he's done this. He could have come in and smashed everything up, couldn't he? We've all seen that done before!"

"She's right," said Jocelin. She, too, retched, and controlled herself. She went back into the room.

Alice had already got a pail, water, and newspapers. She stood for a moment looking at the three, Jasper, Caroline, Bert, who were all still in the doorway, staring at her.

She knelt down at the very edge of the hall, and began on her task of slowly washing the carpet, every inch of it. When she had finished she would get Bert and Jasper to carry it out to the rubbish bins.

"Why are you wasting time washing that for?" demanded Caroline. "Throw it out."

She had expected someone to say just that. She said coldly, "If we put it out like this into the garden it will stink, and there'll be complaints, and an excuse for the police to come back."

"Yeah. That's right," said Jasper.

She went on with her task. She was full of a cold fury. She could have killed, not only the policemen, but Jasper, Bert, and even the good-natured Caroline, whose shocked face peering out of the door seemed to say that one couldn't credit the stupidity and malice of the world.

"Don't go to bed," Alice ordered Jasper. "When I've done this, you and Bert can carry it out."

It took her an hour or so to do the carpet. They carried it, heavy with water and detergent, smelling now of chemicals, out to the dustbins.

"I suppose some night owl will be up and watching, as usual," said Alice, bitter and very tired, standing carefully in the very middle of the hall floor.

Faye said she was going to bed. Roberta took her up, then came back and got another pail and helped with washing down the woodwork and the walls. All the others went to bed.

As Roberta worked, she swore steadily in her other voice, the rough, clumsy, labouring voice of her upbringing, not the slow, easy, comfortable voice of the everyday Roberta they knew. She did not swear loudly, but only just audibly: a steady quiet stream of hatred against the police, the world, God; on her own behalf, on Faye's.

When they had finished, both women took baths. Then Roberta went out for the Sunday papers. But there was nothing in the Sundays, not a word.

Alice and Roberta slept for some hours. Faye, awake at mid- morning, was angry with Roberta for "getting herself involved." To pay her out, she went up to talk to Jocelin, at work on her bombs. First, as apprentice, she helped Jocelin; then, it turning out she had a real aptitude, she tried out a tricky little number on her own account. She came down for a cup of tea and brought her instruction manual with her. At the same moment, Reggie and Mary returned from work on their new flat. It was an awful mess, they said: but, having seen Alice at work, they knew what could be done with chaos. The way they said this told the others that they were determined to be "nice" for as long as they had to stay there. Then Mary picked up from the table The Use of Explosives in an Urban Environment and leafed through it, first casually, then slowly, taking her time. She handed it to Reggie with a look that was far from "nice." In the kitchen at that stage were Caroline, Jasper, Bert, and Faye, and suddenly they were all tense, determined not to look at one another, trying to appear indifferent. Reggie studied the manual, and then laid it on the table. He had not looked at the others, sat thinking. Next he and Mary had a long eye-consultation, and he said that they had decided to move into the new flat, ready or not, at once. Only a few moments before, Mary had been saying that they would be here until their flat at least had hot water.

The couple went upstairs, leaving half-finished cups of tea.

"That wasn't very clever, comrade," said Bert to Faye, showing a lot of his white teeth.

Faye tossed her head. She was breathing fast, smiling and frowning and biting her lips. "It doesn't matter," she stated. "Once they are rid of us, they'll never want to think of us again. We're just shit to them, that's all."

"All the same," said Bert, making an effort to be severe, as the occasion demanded, "that was stooo-pid!" He laughed, as at a joke. She laughed wildly, eyeing him with resentment. Then she scrambled up out of her chair and ran upstairs to Roberta. They could hear, over their heads, Robert's low maternal voice, Faye's angry raucousness; her complaints to Roberta were being made in her "other" voice, that of her upbringing; Roberta answered in her everyday voice.

The three sat on uneasily. Then Jasper said, laughing, "I don't see why Alice should sleep all day," and went up to wake her. Which he did by banging on the door of the room she slept in, where he had slept but now would not. No response. He stepped delicately in, saw the huddled bundle that was Alice turned to the wall, and, finding the dark of the room unlikable, sharply dragged back the curtains. Alice shot up in her bag, eyes screwed up because of the afternoon glare. She saw a black spiky menacing figure outlined against the light, and screamed.

"For fuck's sake," he said, disgusted with her.

"Oh, it's you." She lay down, as she had before, back to him.

He could not stand this. He knelt by her, at her back, and saw sandy eyelashes tremble on her freckled creamy skin.

"Alice," he said, quite politely, but firmly. "You do have to wake up. Something has happened."

She opened her eyes. Did not say, "What?" They remained in that position for quite a time, more than a minute. It was as if, for her, getting up on his order and coming downstairs was going to commit her more than she wanted, commit her again, when she had made a decision.

At her back knelt Jasper. She could feel his warmth on her shoulders, felt in that warmth the determination of his need for her.

She muttered, sounding indifferent, "All right, I'll be down in a moment."

He stayed a bit, hoping she would turn and smile. But she looked at the wall, waiting for him to go. He got up off his knees and went out, quietly shutting the door.

"Oh no," said Alice, breathless, to the wall. "Oh no, I can't." But she suddenly got up, dragged on her jeans and jersey, and went down.

Around the table now were Jasper and Bert, Caroline. Jocelin had been summoned from above.

Alice made herself tea, silent, taking her time. She sat down. She listened to what had happened. Then she said, confirming Faye, "It doesn't matter. They'll never want to think about us again, once they are gone. Anyway, there's no reason to connect anything that happens with us. Lots of people have these how-to-be-a-terrorist books." She did not put this into inverted commas, a joke, as it had been in this house till now. The joke had been worn into ordinariness.

"But they are such bloody law-lovers," said Caroline. "They'll probably think it's their bloody duty to inform, when they connect one thing with another."

There was a bad moment, during which they looked at one another, acknowledging the truth of it. But Bert dismissed it, laughing. "Connect what with what? We haven't even decided."

"This is as good a time as any to talk it over," said Jocelin.

"We'll have to call down Roberta and Faye, then," said Jasper, uneasily. He involuntarily looked up at the ceiling, immediately beyond which Roberta and Faye, presumably reconciled, lay or sat. At any rate, silently.

"Perhaps it isn't the right time," said Bert. From his grimace Alice deduced that Faye was in one of her moods.

She said vaguely, "Perhaps we should do it without Faye."

They all looked at her, ready to be censorious. All, however, were thinking, as she could see, that there was something in what she said.

It was Jocelin, who had been working with Faye for some hours that day, who remarked, "But she's very clever. And she's got some good ideas about where."

"Where?" asked Bert, laughing again. "Tell us. She hasn't patented her thoughts on the subject."

Jocelin said seriously, "I agree with you that Faye is emotional. But I got the impression this morning that she'd be good in an emergency."

"Who is going up to call them down?" said Jasper, facetiously.

They all looked at Alice.

Alice did not move, but stirred her tea.

"Well, what's wrong with you, then?" demanded Jasper.

"I'm tired," she said.

She got up, in a way that seemed both impulsive and mechanical. She seemed surprised she had got up and was going to the door. Jasper was after her and had her by the wrist. "Where are you going?"

"I'm going for a walk," she said.

"But we're discussing whether to have a regular meeting or not. A meeting to decide what venue we are going to use."

Again, it was like the moment when he had knelt behind her as she lay in her sleeping bag. A long pause, and she came back to her chair, went on stirring her tea as if she had not left.

"I'm going to call Faye and Roberta," said Jocelin, and she went upstairs decisively.

They could hear a little descant of voices, Faye shrill, Roberta full and positive, Jocelin coming in like a response. Jocelin had the last word. She came down, announced that it was all right. They waited for half an hour, being humorous about it.

Then they were all together. It went on for hours. They discussed the merits of railway stations, restaurants, public monuments. The Albert Memorial was favourite for a few minutes, and then Faye said no, she adored it; she wouldn't harm a hair of its head. Hotels. Number 10. The Home Office. MI-5's information computer. The War Office.

It went on. As when a group of people are choosing the name for something among many possibilities, the suggestions became wilder and more imaginative, became funnier; the whole thing turned into comedy. From time to time, one of them would say that they must be serious, but it seemed that seriousness was not on the agenda. They were all weak with laughter when they finally decided where. And were restored to seriousness by Faye's imperious demand that it was she who should actually place the explosives. It was her turn, she said. Alice and Jocelin and Bert had had all the fun last time.

The decision was taken that "the real thing" would be conducted by Faye, Jasper, and Jocelin as mistress of explosives, the others assisting. The meeting broke up at about eight. They celebrating by going to the Indian restaurant. Then Faye and Roberta went to the pictures. Bert and Jasper and Caroline - Bert wanted Alice to come, too - went to visit the South London squat. Jocelin had some last finishing touches to make.

Alice said no, she was all right, she wanted to go for a walk. Yes, she did want to go walking; she didn't understand why they made such a fuss. She liked walking by herself.

This was the first time some of them had heard about this proclivity of Alice's, and jocular remarks ensued.

She set off, frowning, into the dark streets. She stopped after a hundred yards or so and stood looking into a garden where only the outlines of flowers, a shrub, were visible, all colour drained from them. She came to herself with a sigh and walked towards her mother's flat. There she briskly rang the bell, almost at once rang it again, and said when she heard her mother's voice, "It's Alice." A pause. "It's Alice," she said, peremptory, peevish.

Another pause. A long one. Then the door buzzed and Alice rushed up the bare ugly stairway. It seemed that she expected, when her mother opened the door, to enter the pleasant large room of the Mellingses' old house, for she charged in as if into a big room and had to pull herself up short in front of her mother, who stood with her back to the armchair she had obviously just left. It was a quite decent little room, but Alice thought it paltry and ugly. The two armchairs, on either side of the little gas fire, which had in the old house had so much space around them, now were like too-large, shabby prisoners, made to face each other. They needed re-covering; Alice had not noticed it before.

She said in a scandalised, hostile voice, "What do you think you are doing, in this place?"

The room was chilly. Alice did not mind this, but Dorothy was wearing a thick jersey and woollen stockings, winter clothes. Alice knew that baggy yellow sweater and the full brown skirt. They were old. Her mother's hair, quite white now, was in an untidy chignon. Her haggard, handsome face, unsmiling, confronted Alice in a frown that showed no signs of softening.

As always when Alice was actually with her mother, pleasant and kindly emotions took over from the angry ones she felt when she was away from her.

The suffering and aggressive face she had brought in with her was already gone, and she smiled. It was the timid, anxious-to-please smile of the good daughter. She looked to see whether she might sit down. The armchair her mother had been in had books stacked up beside it to the level of the arm. On the shelf above the gas fire was a bottle of whisky and a glass, a third full.

The armchair opposite her mother had had someone in it. Alice even looked sharply around to see if this person was hiding somewhere. The cushions of the chair were pressed in, with a look of long and intimate occupancy. There was an empty teacup on the floor by this chair. Alice suddenly imagined Zoë Devlin and her mother sitting opposite each other, and heard their strong, relishing laughter, which seemed to exclude everyone else. A sharp pain went through her, and her look at her mother was again all resentment.

"Why are you bundled up like this? Are you ill?"

A pause. Dorothy said carefully, still frowning, "As you know, I feel the cold. Unlike you."

"Then why don't you light the gas fire?"

A pause. "As you might have been able to work out for yourself, I have to be careful with money."

She spoke in a wary, almost hushed voice, afraid of what a tone of voice, a wrong movement, might provoke. Rather like a nurse with an intractable patient.

"I don't know what you mean," cried Alice. "It can't be so bad that you can't afford to have the fire on if you are cold."

Dorothy Mellings sighed. She turned away. Not to the two armchairs, which now seemed a promise of a long friendly talk that was owed to Alice, but to a small oblong table against the wall, where it seemed she ate her meals. There was a plate on it with one apple and one banana. Alice let out a furious exclamation, and rushed to the small refrigerator in the cooking recess that called itself a kitchen. In the refrigerator was a bottle of milk, some cheese, four eggs, half a loaf of white bread.

Alice whirled round on her mother, but before she could say anything, Dorothy said, "Alice, are you going to want tea or something? Are you hungry?"

"No, I am not hungry," said Alice, sounding accusing.

Dorothy sat down on one of the chairs at the small table, indicating that Alice should sit opposite, but Alice could not bring herself to acknowledge the rights of that petty little table in her mother's life, and she sat on the arm of the chair that had had her mother's friend in it.

"Has Zoë Devlin been here?"

"No, she hasn't. As you know, Alice, we aren't getting on all that well at the moment."

"Oh, don't be so bloody ridiculous. You've known her forever."

"As you know, we quarrelled."

"Well, has Theresa been?"

"Not yet."

"Don't tell me you've quarrelled with Theresa?"

"There is no reason why I should tell you anything at all," said Dorothy. She half got up - she did not need to do more - reached over for her glass of whisky, and took a firm ration of it, her mouth a bit twisted. Grant's whisky. Oh yes, Dorothy might be poor, thought Alice bitterly, but she wasn't going to drink anything but her brand of Scotch.

Alice was looking anxiously at that stern face, which seemed as if it had been set forever into a frown, the brows pulled together.

Alice felt she did not know her mother. Dorothy Mellings, in the good old days, the days that could fill Alice's memory for hours at a time, had been a tall, striking woman with reddish-gold hair in a chignon, creamy, delicately freckled skin, greeny-blue eyes. Rather pre-Raphaelite, really, they had used to joke, all of them. But since Dorothy never lolled or languished or rolled her eyes about, the comparison did not go far. Now she was a tall, strong, elderly woman with all that untidy white hair. Her eyes were like squarish lumps of green stone. When she was with other people - Zoë Devlin, for instance - she was all vitality and laughter.

"Who's been here visiting you, then?"

"Mrs. Wood from downstairs."

Alice stood up, stared, sat down again. "Mrs. Wood! What do you mean, Mrs. Wood! Why, she's..."

"Are you suggesting she isn't good enough for me?"

"But..." Alice was literally unable to speak. All that splendour of hospitality, the big house, the people coming in and out, the meals, the... "Mrs. Wood," she stammered.

"I didn't know you knew her."

"But you can't..."

"You mean that she's working-class? Surely, Alice, you can't hold that against her? As for me, I've reverted to my proper level. And who is it that boasts all the time about her working-class grandfather?" Dorothy, for the first time this evening, was smiling, was really looking at Alice, those greenish eyes cold, angry. "Or is it that you think she's not intelligent enough for me?"

"But you have nothing in common - she's never read anything in her life, for a start, I bet."

"A sudden reverence for literature?" she enquired. And took another mouthful of whisky. "I can tell you, I find the company of Mrs. Wood just as rewarding as... a good many people I might mention. She's not all full of rubbish and pretensions."

This, reminding Alice of that inexplicable movement of her mother towards savage criticism of things she had held dear all her life, filled her eyes with tears, and she thought: It's all been too much for her; oh, how awful, poor thing. She cried out, "You should simply never have said you'd leave home. You should have said you wouldn't go. Then you wouldn't have had to come here."

This sounded like an appeal, as if her mother might even now say, "Yes, it was all a mistake," and go back to her own house.

Dorothy was looking surprised. Then the cautious look was back, with the frown.

"But, Alice, you know what happened."

"What does it matter, what happened? What is going to happen now, that's the point?"

"Well, I do rather despair of talking to you lot about... necessity. It's no use. You've all had it so easy all your lives, you simply do not understand. If you want something, then you take it for granted you can have it...." Alice let out a little protesting sound, meaning to say that as far as she was concerned, her mother had gone off the point entirely. But Dorothy went on, "I know it is no use. I have been thinking hard about you, Alice. And I have come to one simple conclusion. You're all spoiled rotten. You're rotten. And Zoë's children are the same."

This was said without emotion. Almost indifferently. All passion spent.

Alice let this go by her, as part of Dorothy's new persona, or craziness. It was best ignored. Would go away, probably, like this nonsense over living here.

"I think you should tell Cedric that you won't live here; he must give you more money."

Dorothy sighed, shifted about on her hard little chair, seemed to want to droop away from sheer weariness, pulled herself together, sat up.

"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 that 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.

Dorothy slowly got up and went to stand opposite Zoë, as if accepting a challenge to fight. But now the moment had come, both were very pale and serious, and - much worse than shouting, which anyway usually ended in laughter - spoke in low voices that were breathless because of the awfulness of what was happening.

"Listen, Dorothy. I've got to say this and you've got to listen. Even if you start hating me for it. I mean, even more than you do already."

"Rubbish," said Dorothy, impatient.

"Well, it amounts to that, doesn't it? If everything I do or think is stupid in your eyes?"

"Do you want to talk about that? I mean, seriously? People with different political opinions being stupid? That is what I used to think, certainly."

"Dorothy, don't sidetrack me. I want to say this. Do you realise what you are doing, Dorothy? Because Cedric has left you..."

"Five years ago now."

"Let me say it. Cedric left you, and you have to leave this house. And it's all so awful, you just have to burn your boats, scorched-earth policy - just destroy everything as you leave. Because it won't hurt so much if you do."

Here Zoë stood waiting - expectant, it seemed, of Dorothy's grateful acceptance of her diagnosis.

"You can't be serious!" said Dorothy, keeping her voice low, though it sounded bitterly scornful. "You've come here to say that?"

"Yes, I have. It's important. You've got so extraordinary...."

"Strange as it might seem, the idea had occurred to me. You know, that psychotherapy of yours has made you very dim-witted, Zoë. You come out with something absolutely obvious as if it's some revelation."

Zoë stood vibrating with anger. But she was not going to let her voice rise, either. "If it's so obvious, then why do you go on doing it?"

"There might be different ways of looking at it? Can you conceive there might be different ways of looking at a thing? I doubt it, the way you are.... Can't even meet someone who reads a different newspaper.... Listen. My life has to change. Right? Strange as it might seem, I had taken all that into account, what you said. But I am doing a stock-taking - do you understand? I am thinking - do you see? I'm thinking about my life. That means I am examining a lot of things."

Dorothy and Zoë stood opposite each other, standing straight, like soldiers told to stand at ease, or a couple about to start the steps of an intricate dance.

"And all you can see about me," said Zoë, "is that we've got nothing in common. Is that all? Twenty years of being friends."

"What have we got in common now? We've been cooking meals and talking about our bloody children and discussing cholesterol and the body beautiful, and going on demonstrations."

"I haven't noticed you going on any recently."

"No, not since I understood that demos and all that are just for fun."

"For fun, are they?"

"Yes, that's right. People go on demos because they get a kick out of it. Like picnics."

"You can't be serious, Dorothy."

"Of course I'm serious. No one bothers to ask any longer if it achieves anything, going on marches or demos. They talk about how they feel. That's what they care about. It's for kicks. It's for fun."

"Dorothy, that's simply perverse."

"Why is it perverse if it's true? You've just got to use your eyes and look - people picketing, or marching or demonstrating, they are having a marvellous time. And if they are beaten up by the police, so much the better."

A silence. Zoë was staring at Dorothy, bewildered. She really could not believe Dorothy meant it. As for Alice, who was standing there transfixed with flowers in her hands, staring at the two, and praying inwardly, "Oh, don't, don't, please don't, please, please stop," her mother had gone over the edge into destructiveness, and there was no point in even listening to her. Better take no notice.

'Til tell you something, Zoë. All you people, marching up and down and waving banners and singing pathetic little songs - 'All You Need Is Love' - you are just a joke. To the people who really run this world, you are a joke. They watch you at it and think: Good, that's keeping them busy."

"I just don't believe you mean it."

"I don't know why not: I keep saying it."

"You want to smash things up, you want to break with all your friends."

"Well, I just can't talk to you any more. When I say anything I really think, you start weeping and wailing."

"Well, I care about our friendship ending, if you don't."

"I haven't the energy for all these rows and little scenes," said Dorothy.

Then Zoë had run out of the room, muttering something furious - but not loudly; not once had the voices of the two women risen. And Dorothy, with a pale, listless, dreary look, had gone back to the telephone and sat down, ready to make another call. But had not dialled at once. She had sat, head on hand, looking at the wall.

"Shall I make you a cup of tea?" Alice had brightly offered.

"No, thank you, Alice dear."

But she had gone into the kitchen, made tea, taken her mother a cup, put it by her where she still sat, not moving, head in her hand.

Alice thought (standing on the pavement's edge, though she did not know she was, not yet): She needs someone to look after her, she really does! No food to speak of in the refrigerator, drinking away there by herself. It's not on. No, better if she came to live with us, at number 43. She could have those two big rooms upstairs, when Reggie and Mary move out. Through Alice's mind floated the thought, immediately censored: Then I would have someone to talk to.

Alice saw herself and her mother at that table in the big kitchen, newspapers and books all over the place. Dorothy would talk about the books, and Alice would listen to news about that world she herself could not for some reason bring herself to enter.

This idea died a swift natural death.

Alice came to herself, on the pavement's edge. It was chilly. Overhead a sky full of hazy stars. Opposite, a yellow street lamp.

It was about midnight now. Jasper and Bert and Caroline would not be home tonight; she had known that when they went off. And Bert and Caroline would be humping and bumping away together; all those flashing eye exchanges and atmospheres hadn't been for nothing. And Jasper would (if he could) be in the room next to them....

Alice put this last thought out of her mind and entered the house quietly, not wanting to see Faye and Roberta, or Reggie and Mary. But no one was at home, except for Jocelin, still at work. Alice knocked, polite, and went in on a gruff sound that presumably was a "Come in." On the long table in front of Jocelin were four nasty little devices, identical, ranged side by side, and looking rather like outsize and complicated sardine tins. Everywhere on the trestle were parts of bombs, now dismantled, and some white kitchen bowls holding the household chemicals. Presumably waiting to be returned to their proper packets in the kitchen? Jocelin was sorting items into little piles. She nodded at Alice, not smiling. She looked like a factory worker bending over an assembly bench, but no factory worker would get away with those stray pieces of pale greasy-looking hair falling over her face, and the old stained jersey with the hole in the elbow.

"I'm going to bury these," said Jocelin. "We can get them when we need them next." She allowed Alice a smile. "No policeman is going to come digging around in this garden for a bit."

"Are those four enough?" Alice asked, but only to show she marvelled at Jocelin for planning to accomplish so much with so little, and Jocelin nodded, looking at the four items with a satisfied proprietorial air.

She went to the window and stood with her back to Alice, arms akimbo, and turned to say, "It is dark enough. Come on."

The collection of components were swept - carelessly, since they were not dangerous now - into a plastic bag, enclosed in another and then another, and they crept out into the night, not making a sound.

They stood for a minute over the place where the police had started to dig, both thinking that that would be the safest place, but could not face it. A lilac bush near Joan Robbins's fence was still heavy with scent, though its blossoms, black in this light, had gone bruised and blotched. It had some soft soil around it. No lights were on anywhere. Dark houses stood all about, eyeless for once. Making no noise, using a trowel, Alice dug out a good-sized hole, Jocelin slid the bundle in, together they covered it over, and in a moment they were inside the house, feeling warm towards each other, successful accomplices.

In the kitchen, Jocelin said, "I forgot, there's a message. Two, in fact. First, those Irishmen came back." She sounded unworried, but Alice knew something very bad indeed had happened.

"The ones that brought that... materiel?"

"Right. They wanted to know whereabout on the rubbish tip the two cases were put."

"What did you say?"

"I said I didn't know."

As far as Jocelin was concerned, it seemed, that was enough; she sat stirring sugar into her coffee, her mind probably on her handiwork, still ranged neatly side by side, on the trestle upstairs.

"And then?"

" 'Well, now, lady, that isn't enough for us, is it? You can see that for yourself! We have our orders, and that's a fact! The lady we saw last time we came, she must accompany us to the rubbish tip, and show us where the things were placed.'" This Jocelin delivered in an Irish accent, perfect, as far as Alice was concerned - so accurate that she was thinking: Irish? Is she? And if so, what does it mean? Does it matter? Here is another of us with a false voice!

Jocelin went on, "And I said to them, 'Are you coming back, then?' They said: 'And indeed we shall. Tomorrow morning, and that's a fact.' " In her ordinary voice, Jocelin said, and as if all this had nothing to do with her, "So I suppose they will."

"Then I shan't be here," said Alice, sounding calm, yet feeling sick with panic. She had thought that their trip out to drop those packages had been the end of it all.

"And the other thing was, Felicity came in. She said they have found Philip's sister, and the funeral is on Wednesday."

"Then we can't do what we planned on Wednesday." They had decided that Wednesday was the best day for their feat of arms.

Jocelin said, sounding critical, "First things first."

"But somebody must be at his funeral."

"You go. You aren't essential for the plan."

"But I want to be there!"

Jocelin shrugged. She lifted her mug, stood up, said "Good night," and went upstairs. Probably to perfect the four explosive devices.

Alice was going to bed when Mary and Reggie came in to say that they were moving out on Wednesday; they would hire a remover's van.

Alice was ready to laugh at the remover's van, but remembered that two rooms and part of the attic and most of their bedroom were piled with furniture, and simply said, "Right. Will you need help?"

"Won't say no," said Reggie, and off the two went upstairs. So it can't be on Wednesday, said Alice to herself. She, too, went to bed. She woke early and left a note on the table saying that if the Irishmen turned up, they must be told that she, Alice, was away, and that no one knew where the packages were on the rubbish tip; they had probably been covered over long ago under new rubbish. She went out, thinking that presumably that Russian had told them to come. Well, she had sent him packing, hadn't she? They would soon all get tired of coming; it was simply a question of sticking it out. She pushed her anxiety down and out of sight.

It was a pleasant morning, sunny, not cold. She walked around the streets, found it was only ten, sat for a long time in a little restaurant, eating a breakfast she did not really want. Eleven-thirty. She thought of dropping in to see her mother again, actually got to the door, and then, realising she would see that meagre little sitting room and her mother boxed into it, with the two shabby, once-splendid armchairs, lost heart and went off across London to visit a squat where lived a girl she had known in Birmingham. The girl had been at the CCU Congress. They talked about having another one, perhaps next month. The house was perfect for a Congress. Alice thought, her heart cold, that in a month they would all be gone from that house: it had been taken for granted everyone would scatter. Who knew where they would all be?