The Good Terrorist (41 page)

But in the hospital Alice found it was worse than Felicity had said. Broken shoulder. Broken kneecap. Fractured left wrist. Bruises. But he also had a fractured skull. He was being taken down to the operating theatre again in a few minutes. They suspected internal
damage. Meanwhile, he was unconscious. Because Alice said that as far as she knew Philip didn’t have a family, or if so, she couldn’t supply an address, the ward sister had put her down on the form as “next of kin.” Telephone number? But Alice, determined that Felicity should not slide out altogether, said Felicity must be rung in emergencies. Anyway, number 43 had no telephone.

She then stood in a doorway, not knowing what to expect, because she had not visualised anything, and saw in the middle of a room a high slanting contraption like a machine with pulleys and levers and wheels and tubes, and on this, half sitting up but collapsed and limp, was Philip, all bandages and wrappings. His face was really all that was visible: dead white, blue veins fluttering on waxen lids, white lips that seemed to have some sort of dried pink dye at the corners. More than ever he seemed like a small elf, an inhuman creature, and Alice, standing there helpless, with the ward sister just behind her, could not move. She was thinking that this is what happened to marginal people, people clinging on but only just. They made one slip; something apparently quite slight happened, like the Greek, but it was part of some downward curve in a life, and that was that—they lost their hold and fell. Philip had lost his hold.

Alice turned such a shocked face on the ward sister that she said, “Are you all right?” Deliberately perfunctory, because she did not want to cope with Alice. “Go and get yourself a cup of tea downstairs,” said the sister. “Sit down a bit.”

Her look indicated that she was prepared to be concerned about Alice if she produced symptoms that warranted it, but Alice said, “It’s all right.” She watched the sister go to stand by Philip, looking down carefully at him for about a minute. For some reason this long close look told Alice everything. She turned and ran away down the corridors and stood waiting for the lift, and then went down in the lift, but she did not know she was doing these things. She was whimpering steadily, her eyes fixed in front of her—on Philip’s dying face.

And now came the thought: Philip was a long way down on that curve before he asked if he could live with us. What we
thought we saw was somebody at the beginning of a curve up, with a new business, everything in front of him, but it wasn’t like that at all. Probably it wasn’t even the Greek who did him in, made him lose hold—it was when Felicity threw him out. (Alice knew now that this was what had happened, from Felicity’s manner.) Perhaps long before that? Suddenly Alice knew. All of it was perfectly clear, like a graph. It was not a question of Philip’s having “lost hold.” He had never grasped hold. Something had not happened that should have happened: a teacher, or someone, should have said: This one, Philip Fowler, he must be a craftsman, do something small, and delicate and intricate; we must get him trained for that. Look how perfectly he does things! He can’t fold a shirt or arrange some chips and a piece of fish on a plate without making a picture of it.

It had not happened. And Philip began to work for a building firm, like everyone who hasn’t a training. A painter in a building firm, losing one job after another until he said: I’ll start my own business.

The relentlessness of it. The fucking shitty awfulness of it …

She did not afterwards remember how she got back from the hospital. In the kitchen Roberta took one look at her and produced her remedy: brandy was poured into Alice, and Roberta put her arm around her, helped the sodden heavy girl upstairs, got her into her sleeping bag, drew curtains.

Alice slept through the two events of that evening.

The first was that the vicious policeman from the station came in with a policewoman, on some business to do with a stolen car. Jasper and Bert were there, and things didn’t go well, would certainly have ended in violence and arrests, only luckily Mary and Reggie appeared, and dealt with the police in their own language, on their own terms. But Mary and Reggie were afterwards cold, were disapproving, saying that there was really no need for trouble with the police if people knew how to handle them. “And, of course, if they behave themselves,” was implicit.

They went upstairs, but Reggie came down again almost at once to ask whether in fact Jasper and Bert knew anything about the stolen car?

“We are revolutionaries,” said Bert, furious. “Not crooks.”

Then, late, after twelve, Felicity came again to say the hospital had telephoned. Philip was dead. She was very upset, so Alice was told next day. She had had to be asked in, fed Alice’s soup and Roberta’s brandy.

None of this Alice knew till next day. Mid-morning. They were all in the kitchen, the sun coming in, the cat on the window sill.

She said, first, “He went under fast, didn’t he?”—mentally seeing a small broken thing, like a bird or an insect, trying to clutch hold of a straw, a twig, and failing. The others did not understand, but Faye, with a cold smile, said, “Lucky Philip.” Mary said that Philip had struck her as unstable.

Alice remarked that if the police had got this house in their minds as the place to come and have a bit of fun, then it wouldn’t be worth living here. The others of course stared at her, curious: the indifference with which she said it, that was the thing.

Then Alice got up and went upstairs, put Philip’s ladder in position, climbed into the attic, and stood under the great rotten beams, keeping the light of the torch on them. She was thinking—or trying to think, to make her mind, or her comprehension, accept it—that Philip had tackled everything else in the house, all the threats and dangers. But this threat, the main one, he had not dealt with, could not. Because—simply—of his size. Because there was nothing to him but a handful of frail bones and a skim of flesh. Alice could see in her mind’s eye the sort of man who could have pulled down these two rotten beams, then put in others. A large bale of a man (she could see him), shouldering the beams into place. Effortlessly. Humbled but uncomprehending because of the arbitrariness, the frivolity, of life, she went downstairs again, and remarked that if those beams were not dealt with, the house would start falling in, from the top. She sat in the chair she had been in before going upstairs to the beams, at the side of the table. At
head and foot, like mother and father, sat Mary and Reggie. They radiated disapproval. They knew they did, but not that they were full of panic as well.

“The beams are obviously going to have to be put right,” said Mary.

Jasper and Bert, Faye and Roberta, who had been observing Alice put things right for weeks, all looked at her, waiting for her to say, perhaps, “It is all right, I have fixed everything.” Jocelin and Caroline were uninvolved.

Alice remarked, “Oh, so you have found yourself a flat, then?”

Startled, even affronted, Mary said, “Yes, but how did you …?” And Reggie, “But we haven’t told anybody yet; it’s not final.”

“And so,” said Alice, “this house is back on the list, is it?”

“Not for demolition,” said Mary. “It was agreed a mistake was made. Both this house and number forty-five will be converted. But, at any rate, nothing will happen immediately. The point is, there will be plenty of time for you to find somewhere else.”

“Find another squat,” said Reggie kindly.

Again the others looked at Alice, who had put so much into this house, and again seemed surprised that she was unconcerned.

She was examining Mary, examining Reggie, quite frankly, for she needed to know what happened. She could see the two, sitting up side by side in their marriage bed, discussing them all, with identical looks of scandalised criticism. Jim. Faye’s suicide attempt. Now Philip. Alice saw that they must have felt trapped among lunatics. Well, never mind, these two good houses were saved, and a lot of people had found shelter for a time.

“Have you got a job?” asked Alice, sure that Reggie had.

Again, annoyance; because, of course, the middle classes did not like to be so transparent.

“As it happens, yes,” said Reggie. “It’s a new firm, in Guildford. Of course, it’ll be a risk, the failure rate with new firms at the moment being what it is. But it’s an interesting venture; it may succeed.”

The fact that he didn’t say what it was meant, Alice thought, that the “venture” was something they, the others, would criticise.
Chemicals; Reggie was a chemist. Well, she couldn’t be bothered to be interested.

Reggie got up. Mary got up. Smiles all around. But relief was what they felt. Body language. Written all over them. They had felt, Mary and Reggie, that they should sit for a while with the others, because of Philip’s death, and now that was enough, they could go back upstairs and get on with their own, sensible lives.
They
wouldn’t lose hold of life and slip down and away, to be washed into some gutter.

Funny, thought Alice. Sitting around this table, let’s say three weeks ago, all of us. You’d not have said that Philip was due to lose hold. Jim? Yes. And Faye …? Alice was careful not to look at Faye, feeling that a look at this moment would be like a doom or a sentence. To her, Alice, the room seemed full of ghosts, and her heart ached for poor little Philip, who had tried so hard, been so gallant.
It wasn’t fair
.

Well, with Reggie and Mary off soon, there wouldn’t be many left here. Jasper and Bert and herself. Caroline and Jocelin. Faye and Roberta. Seven.

Pat, gone. Jim, gone. Philip, gone. Comrade Andrew—disappeared somewhere. Even the goose-girl seemed to Alice, in this mood, like some good old friend, taken from her. Very well, let them take this house away. Why not? She wasn’t going to care. She knew she had her look: she could feel Jasper’s eyes on her. To avoid them, she got up and began preparations for another cauldron of soup.

“Comrade Alice,” said Bert in his political voice, “we are all here. We had decided to have a meeting when Reggie and Mary crashed in.”

“Oh, were you going to bother to call me?” asked Alice. But she came back to her seat, noting that Bert and Jasper had put themselves at the head and the foot of the table.

Mid-afternoon. Sunshine. Joan Robbins was cutting her hedge with old-fashioned shears. Clack, clack, clack, with irregular intervals that kept the ears straining. In the jug on the stool were some early roses. Yellow. The cat lay on the window sill outside the glass, looking in.

Bert began, “In view of our observations in Moscow and subsequent discussions, Jasper and I agree that we should formulate a new policy. Of course it will have to be discussed fully in its implications, but, just to indicate where our conclusions are pointing, we have a tentative formulation. That the comrades present see no reason to accept directives from Moscow.”

“Or from any other extraneous source,” added Jasper.

Bert leaned forward, and looked at them all challengingly.

“Right on,” said Caroline. She was peeling an orange and licking the juice off her fingers. “I agree, absolutely.”

“Me, too,” said Jocelin at once.

“Well, yes,” said Roberta, “but it certainly wasn’t our idea, was it? I mean, Faye’s and mine?”

“Bloody well right,” said Faye. “Whose idea was it to get us all involved with shitty Comrade Andrew and his works? It was yours, Comrade Bert, and yours, Comrade Jasper.” She was using her proper BBC voice, and this, as always, came as a shock after her usual coquettings with the language. She sounded cold and full of hate.

Bert and Jasper were disconcerted. The fury of their disappointment in Moscow had been soothed away by discussions on policy, on “formulations,” and they had lost sight of recent history in theorising. Alice could see that they were really having to make an effort to remember.

Bert was not prepared to relinquish the pleasures of the “implications,” and he said, “But it is essential to analyse the situation. Advisable, at any rate,” he amended, lamely.

“Why?” said Jocelin. And “Why?” asked Faye.

A silence.

Alice said diplomatically, “There are certain things I’d like to know before we drop the subject.”

Faye sighed. Exaggeratedly. She was making an effort to sit here with them at all. She was very pale. There seemed to be life only in her bright hair, which made its pretty ringlets and curls around her emptied face.

“I’d like to know how next door, how number forty-five, got involved with the bloody Russians,” said Faye.

“Good question,” said Caroline, making little piles of orange peel with her solid white fingers, which had rings gleaming on them.

“Does anybody know?” Alice persisted.

“Jocelin knows,” said Caroline.

Jocelin shrugged, as if irritated by the whole thing.

They all looked at Jocelin. She was not easy to look at. This was not because of her appearance, which was unremarkable. She was a blonde, whose ordinariness was pointed by pretty Faye, so delicate and fine, always presenting herself this way and that. Jocelin did not care whether she was admired, or even seen. Cold green eyes observed everything, and she was angry all the time, as if a generalised anger had taken her over at some point and she had come to believe that this was how one experienced the world. Not easy to withstand that hostility; and people tended to look not at her face, but at her hands, which were fine, with long clever fingers, or at her clothes, hoping to find something of interest there. But she wore, always, jeans and a jersey.

“This is what happened,” said Jocelin. “As far as I know. There was a house over in Neasden, which worked very well as an exchange point, for some weeks. No one expects to use a place for longer than weeks. But suddenly the police were on to it. There was an informer. Or something.”

She lit a cigarette, and Alice could see this was to give her time to work out exactly how much she wanted to say.

Alice prompted, “Exchange what, exactly?”

“What was going through next door—at forty-five. Propaganda material mostly. But also
matériel.”

This businesslike word caused, as Alice could see, agreeable
frissons
in Bert and Jasper, who both, not knowing they did, leaned forward intently to stare at Jocelin. And then, realising what they were doing, looked away, uncomfortable.