The Good Terrorist (53 page)

Roberta and Alice said nothing.

It was seven when they reached home. In the kitchen was Bert, attending to Jasper, who had a great many cuts on his face and his
head, but was otherwise all right. Bert said he should get the cuts stitched up; some of them were deep. Jasper said no. And Jasper was right. He should have stayed, instead of running away, Jocelin argued, and then he could have told some story and got himself stitched up with the others in hospital. Now, he must on no account go near a hospital, or even a doctor. But one of the women in the squat in South London had been a nurse; it would be all right to go down there.

“I don’t think it would be all right,” said Jasper. “The fewer people involved, the better.”

Alice thought this was sensible, and tried to examine the cuts. He shook her off. They didn’t seem too bad to her; perhaps they wouldn’t leave scars. Well, there was always plastic surgery.

The five of them finally sat round the table.

Jasper told them, in a businesslike, formal way, how, as he had turned the car out of the street where it had been left, he had misjudged a distance and scraped the front mudguard of a parked car. He would have driven off, but now there was a car immediately blocking his way, and a man who had seen the incident from a first-floor window came running out to say that Jasper need not think he was just going to escape and get away with it. Jasper had said that no such thought had been in his mind. The man said he was lying. They had had quite a little shouting match before they reached the point of exchanging insurance companies: Jasper, of course, had had to say he would supply the address of his later. Then it turned out that the dented mudguard was pressing on the back wheel, and they had to get out of the car and use a heavy spanner to hit the mudguard until it was free of the wheel. The man from the house was standing over them, as if they were criminals who had to be watched. To reach the dent in the mudguard, Jasper had to lie full-length in the road, and hit it from below, and at an angle. It was awkward and took time, and they were holding up the traffic.

When they at last got into the stream of traffic again, they were so late they thought of calling the whole thing off. Faye could easily disconnect the bombs, but the trouble was that this time the
work would be in full view of all the people in the cars and the passers-by on the pavement. Besides, said Faye, do or die; she was game. A pity to have gone to all this trouble and give up.

When Faye had turned, the second time, not immediately up past the hotel but on the next turning, it was because they had not seen any parking places, had decided to stop the car anywhere they could find a place so that, regardless of who was watching, Faye could wrench the connections off the bombs. They then had only twelve minutes to go. But there were no parking places anywhere along that street.

“No,” Faye had said gallantly, “there’s nothing for it,” and had tried to drive faster, but was hemmed in by traffic.

And when Jasper had got out but Faye had not, was it that Faye’s door had jammed? Had he been going to help her with the door?

This was Roberta, and she sounded accusing.

Jasper hesitated. Alice knew it was because he was trying to think how not to say something. When he looked like this, very pale but luminous, with a candid, suffering, helpless look, it meant he was going to lie. Or wanted to. He began to stutter, checked himself, and said simply, “When Faye drove into the empty space, she went too fast up onto the pavement, and then braked. She did not have on her seat belt. We did not have our seat belts on, you see.”

“Of course not,” said Roberta, severely.

“But she was jerked forward, and the driving wheel got the pit of her stomach. She didn’t have any breath, you see?” he said gently to Roberta. Alice was thinking, There, he’s kind, Jasper’s kind, he didn’t want to tell Roberta any of this.…

Roberta was staring at Jasper, her mouth was open, and she was breathing badly. She was thinking, they all knew, that her Faye had been killed because of some silly little thing, something ridiculous; for the rest of her life Roberta would be thinking, incredulous, that Faye died because she drove too fast and too hard up onto a pavement.

“I could see she couldn’t move,” said Jasper. “I got the car into reverse—I stretched my feet over, and did it. Then I said she must
get out quickly. But she did not move. I think she was too sick to move. I got out to drag her out of the car from the driving side. And then the bomb went off.”

“Five minutes too early,” said Roberta, this time accusing Jocelin. Who, like Jasper, had sat quiet, hesitating. There was something she did not want to say.

Roberta asked quickly, “Who set the timing? Faye?”

“Yes.”

Roberta shook her head, as if saying No, no, no—to all of it—but then sat heavily silent, saying yes to tea, yes to sugar in it, yes to a biscuit. But she did not eat, or drink.

Roberta, they all knew, would at some point come out of this passive state.

Jasper was beginning to hurt, very badly. Bert ran upstairs, fetched painkillers for Jasper, sedatives for Roberta, and a radio.

They listened to the news.

“Five people have been killed, and twenty-three injured, some seriously, this afternoon, when a car exploded outside the Kubla Khan hotel, breaking all the windows down that side and damaging several parked cars. This monstrous and callous crime illustrated yet again the total lack of ordinary feeling by the IRA, who had claimed responsibility for the crime.”

“Well, what about that,” said Jocelin. “What a fucking nerve.”

“Absolutely,” said Alice, not connecting her telephone call with this development. Then, after a few minutes, listening to the indignation, the frustration of the others, she did connect it, and she realised that she could never tell them what she had done. Never. She never would be trusted again.

Suppose Bert remembered that she had been gone off that pavement near to him for what must have been a good five minutes?

It seemed he did not.

At about ten o’clock Caroline came back. She was distant, even cold. She said she wouldn’t sit down; she was tired and wanted to sleep.

She had heard the news, she said, when it seemed that Jasper was about to start the story.

She made herself coffee, drank it standing, not looking at them.

“Where’s Faye?” she asked, and they realised there was no possible way she could know.

Roberta said, “Faye’s dead,” and began to cry. At first it was quiet, helpless weeping, and then she began to wail and moan.

“Well, that was due,” said Bert, briskly.

“Was she in the car, then?” asked Caroline, but she didn’t want to sound interested.

Roberta began to howl, a sound like that which Alice seemed to carry about with her, in her chest; a raw, dismal sound.

They checked that the windows were shut. They gave Roberta yet another sedative pill, and Jocelin and Alice assisted her upstairs. She was heavy, almost inert. They had to push her, support her, even order her to move her legs. Alice ran into the room first to make sure the windows were tight shut. Too late, when Roberta was already lying in the cosy heap of flowered stuffs and cushions that she had shared with Faye, did they remember that another room would have been better. They left her there, hoping that sleep would soon silence that awful weeping.

When the two women returned to the kitchen, they joined Bert and Jasper at the table. Caroline sat on the window sill, keeping her distance from them. They were silent, trying not to be affected by that terrible noise just over their heads. Roberta was howling now, and didn’t sound human. They could have believed it was an animal up there: a wounded animal, or a dying one.

They were all pale, and tense. Bert’s forehead had beads of sweat on it. On Jasper’s face was a cold little smile. Caroline seemed ill. Jocelin was the least disturbed of them.

Bert kept sending appealing looks at Caroline, who would not look at him. Suddenly he pulled out of his top pocket, where it had been buttoned in over his heart, a piece of much-folded paper that had words scribbled on it. They all knew what the words were, for Bert had made sure they had the benefit of them, more than once. Now, having looked at each of them, one after another, carefully, to claim their attention—but Caroline still would not respond—he read, “The law should not abolish terror; to promise that would be self-delusion or deception; it should be substantiated and legalised in principle, clearly, without evasion or embellishment. The paragraph
on terror should be formulated as widely as possible, since only revolutionary consciousness of justice and revolutionary conscience can determine the conditions of its application in practice.” A silence. They were not looking at him. “Lenin,” said Bert. “Lenin,” he insisted, with confidence.

Alice had been watching him as he read, interested to see if that vision of him she had had outside the hotel would reappear—the leaden-faced corpselike Bert; but, on the contrary, the reading strengthened him, and he smiled as he read, his white teeth showing between healthy red lips.

Jocelin said, “Thanks,” as a matter of form, but she was listening to Roberta. She lit a cigarette, and her hands were shaking. Seeing that they noticed this, she muttered, “Reaction, that’s all.”

Jasper continued to smile. He might have been listening to distant music. Alice knew he was controlling the need to be sick. She thought he looked like a wounded soldier, with his bloodstained bandages.

Then Caroline got off the window sill and said, “What has Russia’s Criminal Code got to do with us? Or Lenin, for that matter,” she added, daring them. “All amateur rubbish, if you ask me,” she said, angrily, and to Alice, “There was a message for you. A man came this afternoon. An American. He said he would be back to see you tomorrow. About four. Gordon O’Leary.”

She did not look at Bert, but went out, without saying good-bye.

“Gordon O’Leary again,” remarked Jocelin, as if it didn’t matter very much.

“Bloody cheek,” said Alice mechanically, thinking she was in for a busy day, lunch with Peter Cecil, and then Gordon O’Leary in the afternoon.

No one else said anything.

Then Bert said, “I’m off, too. No point in hanging around.”

“Me, too,” said Jasper.

“You’re
leaving?”
said Alice, incredulously, to Jasper.

“But we said we were going, the moment it was done,” said Jasper, not looking at her.

She thought, Surely he can’t be planning to go off with Bert?
Why, the moment Bert gets another woman, he’ll be a spare part again.

She said nothing, and this made Jasper uneasy. Truculent, he asked her, “Well, how about you? Coming?”

“I don’t think I’m going to leave,” she said, vaguely.

“But you’ll have to. Mary said this house was on the agenda again.”

“Oh, they are always saying that,” said Alice.

“Don’t be so bloody stupid,” said Jasper. “If not this month, then next, or the month after.”

“Well, in the meantime, I’ll stay. And someone has to stay with Roberta.”

This being unarguable, Jasper was silent for a little, and then, overcome again by Alice’s intransigence, he said, amazed, scandalised at her, “But, Alice, we agreed to scatter. It was a unanimous decision.” And he even grasped her wrist in the old bony urgent grip, and bent to stare into her face.

That grip told her that she would not be without him for long. She smiled tranquilly up at that face, with its blue eyes in the creamy shallow lakes where the tiny blond freckles were, and said, “Let me know where you are, and we’ll keep in touch. Anyway, does anyone know where Roberta’s relatives are? She does have some, doesn’t she?”

They knew only the hospital where Roberta’s mother was dying.

“She won’t stay here,” said Jocelin, and Alice knew she was right.

Bert went up to get his canvas sack with clothes in it, and some books. Jasper fetched his belongings. He had even less than Bert.

Alice sat listlessly at the table, thinking of this house, this home she had made, deserted, empty, and the Council builders coming in.

Jocelin said she would leave in the morning. Said she thought the bag full of explosive components would be safe enough until they were needed. Laughed. Went upstairs.

Bert and Jasper lingered about the kitchen, at this last moment not wanting to leave. Not wanting to leave her, or the comfort she
had made for them all? She did not choose to think about that. She remarked that she thought Roberta was quietening down.

And certainly the howling from overhead was less. It stopped. The house was silent.

Jasper bent quickly, and darted a kiss onto Alice’s cheek, as in a game of “last touch.” “See you,” he said, and went out, not looking to see if Bert was following. It wasn’t easy for him to leave her, thought Alice gratefully.

Alice was alone in the kitchen.

She listened to the news again. Well, they certainly were getting enough coverage; they had made their mark, all right.

Five dead. Another one, a girl of fifteen, seemed likely to die. Over twenty injured.

The midnight news devoted more than five minutes to the story.

Alice slept, sitting at the table, head on her arms.

She woke at about six, to see Roberta, shaky, sick, and awful, making herself tea.

Roberta said she would pack her things and be off. She would go to see her mother. She should have gone before, of course, but Faye … Her voice shook, she bit her lips, controlled herself, and drank her tea. She went upstairs to pack, came down with various addresses where Alice could reach her, pencilled neatly on a slip of paper. At least Roberta was not floating out of her life forever.

Roberta, unlike the others, owned a lot of things. She would abandon the actual furniture, but keep curtains, hangings, coverlets, pillows, mirrors, blankets. These were made into two great bundles, and she took them away in a taxi to the station.

Alice listened to the 8:00 a.m. news.

The IRA (in Ireland) said they had had nothing to do with yesterday’s bombing, and they would kneecap those who committed such acts in their name. They did not—said the IRA (in Ireland)—go in for murdering innocent people.