she did raise her eyes to Alice’s face, and seemed startled at what she saw there.
‘How many of you are there?’ she asked in a hurried playing-for-time way, glancing at the note, and then making herself confront Alice’s face, that face which could not be denied. It was not fair! Mrs Whitfield seemed to be feeling. They were inappropriate and wrong, these emotions that Alice had brought into this orderly and sensible office. Probably, what Mrs Whitfield should be doing was simply to tell Alice to go away and come back better supplied with evidence of her status as a citizen. Mrs Whitfield could not do this. She could not. Alice saw from how that large smooth confined bosom heaved, from the soft flushed shocked face, that she – Alice – was on the point of getting her way.
‘Very well,’ said Mrs Whitfield at last, and sat for a moment, not so much in doubt now that she had made a decision, but worried. For Alice. ‘Those are big houses,’ she remarked, meaning: they use a lot of electricity.
‘It’ll be all right,’ said Alice, sure that it would be. ‘Can you switch it on this afternoon? We have got an electrician at work. It would be a help…’
Mrs Whitfield nodded. Alice went out, knowing that the official was watching her go, disturbed, probably already wondering why she had given in.
Instead of going straight home, Alice went to the telephone box at the corner and dialled her mother. A voice she did not at first recognize; but it was her mother. That awful flat voice…Alice nearly said, ‘Hello, this is Alice,’ but could not. She gently replaced the receiver and dialled her father. But it was his partner who answered.
She bought a large thermos, which would always be useful, for example on demos or at pickets; asked Fred’s wife to fill it with strong tea, and went home.
The white dusty cloud in the kitchen had subsided. She said to Philip, now crouched on the floor with half the floorboards up, ‘Be careful they might switch it on at any moment.’
‘It is on, I’ve just tested,’ said Philip, and gave her a smile that made it all worth while.
They sat on the great table, drank strong tea and were companionable and happy. It was a large room. Once a family had had its centre here, warm and safe and unfailing. They had sat together around this table. But Alice knew that before all that could begin again, there must be money.
She left Philip, and went to the sitting-room where Pat was awake and no longer lying abandoned and open to Alice’s anxious curiosities. She was reading. It was a novel. By some Russian. Alice knew the author’s name as she did know the names of authors, that is, as if they were objects on a shelf, round, hard and glittering, with a life and a light of their own. Like marbles, that you could turn between your fingers for as long as you liked, but they would not yield, give up their secrets, submit.
Alice never read anything but newspapers.
As a child they had teased her: Alice has a block against books. She was a late reader, not something to be overlooked in that bookish house. Her parents, particularly her mother, all the visitors, everyone she ever met, had read everything. They never stopped reading. Books flowed in and out of the house in tides. ‘They breed on the shelves,’ her parents, and then her brother, happily joked. But Alice was cherishing her block. It was a world she could choose not to enter. One might politely refuse. She persisted, polite but firm, secretly tasting the power she possessed to disquiet her parents. ‘I do not see the point of all that reading,’ she had said; and continued to say, even at university, doing Politics and Economics, mainly because the books she would be expected to read did not have the inaccessible mocking quality of those others. ‘I am only interested in facts,’ she would say during this period when there was no escaping it: a minimum number of books had to be read.
But later she had learned she could not say this. There had always been books of all kinds in the squats and communes. She used to wonder how it was that a comrade with a good, clear and correct view of life could be prepared to endanger it by reading all that risky equivocal stuff that she might dip into, hastily, retreating as if scalded. She had even secretly read almost to the end of one novel recommended as a useful tool in the struggle, but felt as she had as a child: if she persevered, allowing one book to lead her on to another, she might find herself lost without maps.
But she knew the right things to say. Now she remarked about the book Pat was reading: ‘He’s a very fine humanist writer.’
Pat let Laughter in the Dark close and sat thoughtfully regarding Alice.
‘Nabokov, a humanist?’ she asked, and Alice saw that there was serious danger of what she dreaded more than anything, literary conversation.
‘Well, I think so,’ Alice insisted, with a modest smile and the air of one who was prepared to defend an unpopular position reached after long thought. ‘He really cares about people.’
Somebody – some comrade, at some time, in some squat or other, had said as a joke, ‘When in doubt classify them as humanists.’
Pat’s steady, interested, thoughtful look was reminding Alice of something. Of someone. Yes, Zoë Devlin. Thus she would regard Alice when the subject of literature came up and Alice had had no alternative but to make a contribution.
Suddenly, Alice remembered something. Zoë Devlin. Yes.
A quarrel, or at least an argument between Dorothy Mellings and Zoë Devlin. Recently. Not long before Alice left.
Alice was concentrating so hard on what she remembered that she slowly sat down, hardly noticing what she did, and forgetting about Pat.
Her mother had wanted Zoë to read some book or other and Zoë had said no, she thought its view of politics was reactionary.
‘How do you know when you haven’t read it?’ Dorothy had asked, laughing.
‘There are lots of books like that, aren’t there,’ Zoë had said. ‘Probably written by the CIA.’
‘Zoë,’ Dorothy had said, no longer laughing, ‘is that you? Is that Zoë Devlin speaking? My good friend, the fearless, the open-minded, the incorruptible Zoë Devlin?’
‘I hope it is,’ said Zoë, laughing.
‘I hope it is, too,’ said Dorothy, not laughing. ‘Do we still have anything in common, do you think?’
‘Oh go on, Dorothy, let up, do. I don’t want to quarrel even if you do.’
‘You are not prepared to quarrel about anything so unimportant as a book? As a view of life?’
Zoë had made a joke of it all. Had soon left. Had she been back to the house again? Of course, she must have, she had been in and out of that house for – since before Alice was born.
Zoë was one of Alice’s ‘aunties’, like Theresa.
Why had Alice not thought of going to her for money? Wait, there was something there, at the back of her mind – what? Yes, there had been this flaming row, terrible, between Dorothy and Zoë. Yes, recently, good Christ, not more than a week or so ago. Only one row? No, more. A lot.
Dorothy had said Zoë was soft-centred, like a cream chocolate.
They had screamed at each other. Zoë had gone running out. She – Alice – had screamed at her mother, ‘You aren’t going to have any friends, if you go
