The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page A

insisted Anthony.
    “Oh no, she can’t be!”
    A pause, while the steam from the plate of soup he had brought her, and had set on the little table beside her, ascended between them. Through the steam, they looked at each other.
    “Thirty-five; no, thirty-six,” she said flatly at last.
    “Arrested development,” said Anthony firmly, insisting on his right to dislike Alice.
    “Oh yes, I expect so, but darling Alice, well, she’s a sweet girl—a sweet thing, really.”
    In Alice’s little street the houses were full of lights and people, the kerbs crammed with the cars of those who had returned from work; and her house loomed at the end, dark, powerful, silent, mysterious, defined by the lights and the din of the main road beyond. As she arrived at the gate, she saw three figures about to go into the dark entrance. Jasper, Bert. And the third?—Alice ran up, and Jasper and Bert turned sharply to face possible danger, saw her, and said to the boy they had with them, “Philip, it is all right, this is Alice. Comrade Alice, you know.” They were in the hall, and Alice saw this was not a boy, but a slight, pale young man, with great blue eyes between sheaves of glistening pale hair that seemed to reflect all the dim light from the hurricane lamp. Her first reaction was, But he’s ill, he’s not strong enough! For she had understood this was her saviour, the restorer of the house.
    Philip said, facing her, with stubbornness she recognised as being the result of effort, a push against odds, “But I’ve got to charge for it. I can’t do it for nothing.”
    “Fifty pounds,” said Alice, and saw a slight involuntary movement towards her from Jasper that told her he would have it off her if she wasn’t careful.
    Philip said, in the same soft, stubborn voice, “I want to see the job first. I have to cost it.”
    She knew that this one had often been cheated out of what was due to him. Looking as he did, a brave little orphan, he invited it! She said, maternally and proudly, “We’re not asking for favours. This is a job.”
    “For fifty pounds,” said Bert, with jocular brutality, “you can just about expect to get a mousehole blocked up. These days.” And she saw his red lips gleam in the black thickets of his face. Jasper sniggered.
    This line-up of the two men against her—for it was momentarily that—pleased her. She had even been thinking as she raced home that if Bert turned out to be one of the men that Jasper attached himself to, as had happened before, like a younger brother, showing a hungry need that made her heart ache for him, then he wouldn’t be off on his adventures. These always dismayed her, not out of jealousy—she insisted fiercely to herself, and sometimes to others—but because she was afraid that one day there might be a bad end to them.
    Once or twice, men encountered by Jasper during these excursions into a world that he might tell her about, his grip tightening around her wrist as he bent to stare into her face looking for signs of weakness, had arrived at this squat or that, to be met by her friendly, sisterly helpfulness.
    “Jasper? He’ll be back this evening. Do you want to wait for him?” But they went off again.
    But when there was a man around, like Bert, to whom he could attach himself, then he did not go off cruising —a word she herself used casually. “Were you cruising last night, Jasper? Do be careful; you know it’s bad enough with Old Bill on our backs for political reasons.” This was the hold she had over him, the checks she could use. He would reply in a proud, comradely voice, “You are quite right, Alice. But I know my way around.” And he might give her one of his sudden, real smiles, rare enough, which acknowledged they were allies in a desperate war.
    Now she smiled briefly at Jasper and Bert, and turned her attention to Philip. “The most important thing,” she said, “is the lavatories. I’ll show you.”
    She took him to the downstairs