no, it was genuine, she was pretty sure of it; body-language – a skill Alice had been equipped with by instinct, long before there was a name for it – told her that Reggie was all right about colour, at least. She sat listening to them talk, everything easy, Reggie with Jim, Mary with Philip. She made mugs of coffee and set before them a plate of cake.
Chat. How she, Alice, had fixed things with Electricity, and would with the Gas Board. The Water Board of course would be told. Alice did not say that the Water Board would not catch up with them for months and that she had no intention of attracting their attention. These two were bill-payers and keepers of accounts.
She said, to warn them, ‘I have lived in a lot of squats, and you’ll have to accept it, some people don’t pull their weight. They just don’t.’
At this Jim said, hurt, ‘Until you came there wasn’t anything to pay, was there?’ and she said, ‘No, I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about the situation. It’s no good these two moving in and expecting everything to be regular.’
Mary said, ‘But with so many people here, it will still be cheaper than anything else could possibly be, with no rent.’
‘Exactly,’ said Reggie. And came straight to his point, with, ‘Tell us about the CCU? You know, we’ve never heard of it. Mary and I were talking in the pub. It didn’t ring a bell with either of us.’
‘Well, it’s not a very big party, really,’ said Alice. ‘But it’s growing. When we started it, we never meant it to be a mass party, we don’t want it to be. These mass parties, they lose touch with the people.’
‘Well, that’s true enough,’ said Reggie, but he said it carefully, as though he could have said other things; and Alice thought: He and Mary are going to exchange glances…They didn’t, but only with an effort so obvious she thought contemptuously: People are so amazing. They exchange glances as if no one can see them, and they don’t know how they give themselves away…anyone can read what people are thinking.
Reggie: ‘The CCU – the Communist Centre Union?’
‘Centre, because we wanted to show we were not left deviants or revisionists.’
‘Union – two parties joined, two groups?’
‘No, a union of viewpoints, you see. No hair-splitting. We didn’t want any of that.’
‘And you started the CCU?’
‘I was one of them. And Jasper Willis. Have you heard of him?’ As Reggie and Mary shook their heads, Alice thought, But you will. ‘Several of us. It was up in Birmingham. We have a branch there. And a comrade wrote last week to say he had started a branch in Liverpool. He has four new members. And there’s the branch here, in London.’
Here Mary and Reggie were finally unable to prevent their eyes from meeting. Alice felt a flush of real contempt, like hatred. She said, ‘All political parties have to start, don’t they? They start with only a few members. Well, we’ve only been going a year and we have thirty members here in London. Including the comrades in this house.’ She resisted the temptation to say: And of course there are some next door.
‘And your policy?’ asked Reggie, still in the same careful way that means a person is not going to allow a real discussion to start because his opinion has to be kept in reserve.
All right! thought Alice again, you just wait, you’ll hear of the CCU. Anyway, you are going to join because you want to live here. Opportunist! She was thinking at the same time, we’ll educate you. Raw material is raw material. It’s what you’ll be like in a year that counts. If you haven’t saved up enough to move out before then. Well, at least you two will be in no hurry to see this squat come to an end. She said, ‘We’ve got a policy statement. I’ll give you one. But we are going to have a proper Conference next month and thrash out all the details.’
But they weren’t listening, Alice could see. They were thinking about how soon they could move in.
They asked whether they could bring in some furniture, and offered pots and pans and an electric kettle.
‘Gratefully accepted,’ said Alice, and so they chatted on until Jasper and Bert came back from next door, and Alice knew that there was no problem at all about these two staying. Not from that quarter, anyway, whatever it might turn out to be; though Roberta and Faye were another thing.
Reggie sat quietly, leaning back in the chair, summing up Jasper, summing up Bert. Alice knew that he warmed to Bert. Well, they were two of a kind. He did not much like Jasper. Oh, she knew that look when people first met Jasper. She remembered how she too, when she had first seen Jasper all those years ago, had felt some instinctive warning, or shrinking. And look how mistaken she had been.
At eleven Mary and Reggie went off; they were afraid to miss the last trains back to Highgate, and Fulham, where they respectively lived, so far apart.
Philip said he was tired and went to bed.
Jim went into his room and they heard soft music from his record-player accompanied by his softer drums.
‘What’s happened to Faye and Roberta?’ asked Alice, and Bert said, ‘There’s a women’s commune in Paddington, they go there a lot.’
‘Why don’t they move in there?’
‘They like it here,’ said Bert, with a grimace that said, Ask no questions and…
Bert went up to sleep. Jasper and Alice were alone in the kitchen.
‘All right,’ said Jasper. ‘I’ll tell you, give me a chance.’
They went up to their room; Jasper had not said she must move out, or that he would; and Alice slid down into the sleeping-bag the way a dog slinks, eyes averted, into a favourite place, hoping no one will notice.
They could hear Bert moving about next door. Jasper said, ‘Bert and Pat are going away for the weekend.’ His voice was painful to hear.
‘Only for the weekend,’ Alice comforted him for the loss of Bert. As for her, her saddened heart told her how much she would miss Pat, even for the weekend. ‘Where are they going?’
‘They didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.’
They lay companionably along their wall, their feet not far from each other. They had not yet found curtains for this room, and the lights from the traffic still chased across the ceiling, and the whole house shook softly with the heavy lorries going north, giving Alice a comforting sense of familiarity, as if they had been living here for months, not days; she seemed to have lived all her life in houses that shook to heavy traffic.
‘Would you like to come down to the picket tomorrow?’
‘But I really have to be here,’ mourned Alice.
‘Well, Saturday night we could go and paint up a few slogans.’
She steadied her voice so that it would not betray her surge of delight, of gratitude. ‘That’d be nice, Jasper.’
‘Yes. Get some spray paint.’ He turned to the wall. She was not going to hear anything about next door tonight. But tomorrow, tomorrow night…she might. And on Saturday…
