The smell of paint was very strong. Soon Jasper said he couldn’t sleep in it and went upstairs. His tone was such that Alice did not dare to go with him. She went down into the sitting room for the night.
She slept badly, often waking to listen so that she would not miss his going in the morning. She heard the two men come down the stairs and go into the kitchen. She followed them; felt herself already excluded, not wanted. It was only six, a fresh sunny chilly late-spring morning.
It seemed to Alice that Jasper hardly saw her as he went off. He waved to her from the gate, where she stood like any housewife seeing off her man.
She went back to her sleeping bag, with the feeling that a lot of time had to be got through before Jasper came home to her.
But the days went by pleasantly. Pat was infinitely available to Alice, helping with painting and cleaning; between them the two women accomplished miracles, dingy caves being transformed one after another to fresh and lively rooms. Pat was funny and sweet, agreeable, entertaining. Alice opened and expanded in this normality, this ease, and thought again how much of her time was spent with a tightened heart and grim expectation of another put-down from Jasper. Yet, while she enjoyed it all, liked Pat, felt she had never been so happy, she was thinking, Yes, but this is how people behave when they have decided to go away: in a sense she has already left.
Philip, affectionately supported by the two women, got the hot-water system working. They all had celebratory baths. Even Faye did, when encouraged by Roberta. Philip went back onto the roof and finished the tiling. He replaced floors and fallen plaster, mended the machineries of lavatory cisterns, and, borrowing the car from next door, got new piping to replace old. He found a thrown-away central-heating panel or two, and there was real heating. He located two great beams of good timber lying on a waste lot half a mile away, but could not lift them; they would have to wait for Bert and Jasper to help him.
Between Alice and Mary and Reggie took place the accounting session that would bring in a regular contribution to the household. Mary, who of course knew exactly what would have to be paid, had already worked out her and Reggie’s shares. It was very little. Electricity, gas? With ten in the house, what could that come to? An assessment was made. Water? The Water Board had not yet caught up with them. It seemed this was as far as the couple had thought; as though that would be it. Alice said dryly that this and this and this had been brought in.
“Yes, but from the skips,” said Mary sharply, betraying that she had not omitted to notice what was being brought in.
This was taking place at the kitchen table. Reggie and Mary opposite each other, so amiable and self-assured; Alice sitting at the head of that table, waiting for what would come her way. She knew already. She could see in Mary’s eyes a gleam that meant she was calculating, not what she might owe to Alice, but what she was accumulating, of course at the moment only in imagination, for the purchase of their flat, or house.
Alice said, “We’ve paid for the gas boiler, for a lot of cable, for tools, for wood, for glass.”
She did not expect very much. Rightly. Glances flew back and forth between Reggie and Mary, and a sum of twenty pounds was offered and accepted.
No mention was made of Philip’s work. Alice could positively hear the thought: But of course he wouldn’t do it if he weren’t going to live here.
Smiling, even demure, Alice accepted the tea that Mary offered to prepare—out of guilt, of course—and looked at the other two and thought: God, how I hate you people. How I hate your mean, scrimping, grabbing, greedy guts. Because she knew she swelled and paled, in the grip of her look, she smiled even more and then invited them to start talking about their plans for their future home, which they did at once, and ceased to notice her.
Jim took the letter to Cedric Mellings, and came back limp and weepy with happiness. He could start tomorrow. By chance someone was leaving. By chance, Jim would suit Cedric Mellings very well. Jim could look forward, too, to training in the new technical mysteries.
Alice said sharply, “Guilty conscience. That lot—it’s all guilt with them.”
Jim said, “He’s very nice, Alice. He was very nice to me.” They were in the kitchen. Jim, seated, or perched, on his chair, could not settle, but got up and stumbled about, laughing helplessly, or sat and laid his head on the table and laughed, sounding as if he wept, then, in an excess of happiness and gratitude, banged his two fists on either side of his head, which banging turned into a little sharp jubilant rhythm. Next he sat up and flung wide his arms in the same movement, his eyes rolling, his black face smiling wide, white teeth showing.
Alice, with a thousand terrible things to say about her father, kept them back, because she loved Jim, loved his helplessness, his vulnerability, and her own part in alleviating these wounds; because she knew this man, or boy—he was twenty-two—was really sweet, had a sweet gentle warmth in him; and she knew that a spell of happiness, of success, would transform him. She could imagine how he would be, earning money, taking command of his life. She could see him clearly: Jim as he was now, but filled out with confidence and new skills. Therefore, she said not one more word about her shitty father, but only listened, sharing in what she knew was a moment in his life he could never forget.
Then she took him out to supper to celebrate, Philip and Pat joining in, and the evening became one of those when the participants have to pause, to say to themselves: Yes, this is me, it really is me.… Happiness sat with them at the table in the Seashell Fish-and-Chips; they could not stop smiling, or Jim from laughing and sighing. When he said, “I can’t believe this is me, man,” they looked at one another, unable to bear that they could not express what they felt for him, but they could laugh, and—it was Pat who sat next to him—stroke or pat him, or embrace him. The other people in the restaurant, who might at other times have had stringent thoughts about race, or about white women publicly embracing black men (or at least not with such total lack of self-consciousness), were, it could be seen from faces that also showed tendencies to laugh without reason, subdued to the demand of the occasion, which was for a total and uncritical abandon to happiness.
The four went back to number 43, in a close, tender group, Jim as king, as victor, and, unwilling that the evening should be lost, they sat on around the kitchen table, sentinelled by the yellow forsythia, and could not bear to part.
Alice was already thinking: Yes, tonight you’d think we’ll all be friends for life, we could never harm each other, but it could all change, just like that! Oh, she knew, she had seen it all. Her heart could have ached, could have dragged her down, but she did not let it, was keeping that lump of a heart on a short, cruel chain like a dangerous dog.
A postcard showing the Wicklow Mountains arrived from Jasper, with the message “Wish you were here!” She knew exactly the freakish mood he had been in, and her face assumed that smile the thought of Jasper so often evoked: modest, wistful, and admiring, as if his vagaries of genius would forever be beyond her. She kept the card to herself because she knew the others would not understand. Coming downstairs early, long before the others, she had seen it lying on the floor inside the door.
Jim went off for his first day at work in a mood of tender incredulity, still unable to stop smiling.
Pat, instead of joining Alice in their scrubbing and painting, went off to “a friend,” came back saying that Bert had telephoned a message. All was well, and they would be back soon.
What are they doing for money? was Alice’s thought, kept to herself. She also thought: When Bert comes back, Pat will not be here. She could read this from Pat’s face. But she kept that to herself, too.
That evening a knock—furtive and hasty, telling Alice who it was—brought her out to find Monica on the path near the gate-not outside the door, for the girl had been afraid that Faye might open it.
But, seeing Alice, she approached swiftly, her hungry eyes on Alice’s face.
Faye was in the kitchen with Roberta, so Alice shut
the door quietly behind her and went with Monica out to the road, and along it to where they were hidden by the healthy bushes of Joan Robbins’s garden.
“Did you hear of anything?” Monica asked, already sullen and hopeless, apparently seeing from Alice’s face that there was no news. She looked puffy and pale. Her hair straggled greasily. From her came such a whiff of defeat that Alice had to force herself to stand up to it.
“There’s nothing to hope for from the Council,” said Alice, and, seeing a sneer or snarl of Well, of course not!, persisted, “but I’ve thought of something else.” She asked Monica to stay where she was, sneaked back into the house as though she were guilty of something, came out again with the letter she had written to her mother. Monica had drifted halfway back to the main road, apparently expecting Alice not to reappear.
“Did you think I was not coming back?” she scolded. “Really, if you are going to expect the worst, then that is what you’ll get.”
A weak, conscious smile.
“Take this to this address. And take your baby with you.”
“But it’s so late. God knows it’s hard enough to get him off to sleep in that place, and he’s asleep now.”
“Go tomorrow. It’s my mother. She likes babies. She likes looking after people.”
The doubt on Monica’s face did not in any way diminish the total confidence Alice felt. Look what she had achieved with Jim! No, she was on a crest of ability and luck, and she could make no mistakes. She felt that her mother would be good to poor Monica. She said briskly, “It’s all right, Monica. Well, it’s worth trying, isn’t it?”
Peering down dubiously at the envelope, Monica departed to the bus stop in the main road, and Alice went in to join the others around the table. She had prepared a large stew, or thick soup, her speciality, brought to perfection in years of communal living. How many people had joked that Alice could feed crowds out of it! Like the Bible’s loaves and two fishes.
How many had come into this squat or that asking, “Any of your soup left, Alice?” and then sat breaking bread into it, handing back their plates for more. No dietary deficiencies in people who lived on her soup! And in times when there had been very little money, it had kept them going, Jasper and her, for months.
Alice slid back into her place, saying, to their querying, ready-for-any-emergency looks, “It’s all right, it was nothing.”
Roberta and Faye, Mary and Reggie, Philip and Jim, Pat and Alice sat around all evening, compelled into being a family by the magic of that soup, and the red wine that Reggie had contributed, and the good bread, healthy wholemeal, and the frivolous white that Faye insisted on.
This was another evening of pleasure, and Jim was full of tales about Alice’s father and the others working with him, twelve or more, and how lucky Alice was to have such a father—while Alice smiled and kept a lock on her tongue.
Next morning Alice was alone in the house when there was a tumult of thudding knocks on the door, and a voice screamed, “Come out, you, come out of there, come out.”
Alice went out to Monica, who was transformed by fury, ready to kill, as Alice could see. The child in the pushchair, poor ugly little thing, grizzled steadily.
“Why did you do that? Why did you send me there? What have I done to you?” And Monica began kicking out at Alice’s legs, and beating about with her arms.
“What is the matter? What happened? Didn’t she take you in?”
“There’s no one there,” screeched Monica. “Why did you send me there?”
“Well, she’s only out shopping, isn’t she? She’ll be back.”
Monica stopped screeching, her limbs stopped flailing, and she stared, appalled, at Alice. “It’s an empty house,” she said. “No one there. There’s a ‘For Sale’ notice up.”
“You went to the wrong house,” said Alice, vaguely. She was, indeed, struck by something, a thought, or a memory: cases on a kitchen table, filled with crockery wrapped in newspaper. She stared at Monica, who stared at her.
“There’s a mistake,” said Alice, who was as pale as Monica, and as breathless by now. “Something’s wrong.”
“It’s you who’s wrong,” said Monica, with a sudden ugly laugh. She still stared at Alice, as if unable to believe what she saw. “Why did you do this to me? What for? You get some kind of a kick out of it, I suppose. You’re evil,” she pronounced. “You are all evil and mad in this house.” And, bursting into wails, she went running off, pushing and jolting the pushchair so that the child wailed, too. The two went noisily to the bus stop, leaving Alice on the doorstep, stunned, and staring without seeing at the letter she had written to her mother, thrust into her hand by Monica.
Dear Mum,
This is Monica. She is living with her baby in one of those ghastly hotels, you know. Well, if you don’t you fucking well ought to know. Why don’t you take her in? It’s the least you can do. You’ve got three empty rooms now. Monica and her baby are living in one shitty room, with no place she can cook or anything.
Your daughter, Alice.
P.S. And there is a husband, too.
She went in and sat on the bottom step of the staircase. Sat there for a long time, her mind blank. Then she began a curious movement, rubbing her hand over her face, as though feeling for something or wanting something. It was quite a hard movement, dragging the flesh this way and that, and it went on for some time, perhaps ten minutes. A task she had to perform, a necessity; an observer could have thought she had been ordered to do this, to sit on that step with her fingers pushing her flesh about over her face.
Then she methodically collected her bag, and went off to the Underground, walked up the streets to her mother’s house, and stood outside it looking at the “For Sale” sign. She could not take it in. Using her key, she briskly admitted herself. But inside it was as if something had sucked out furniture, leaving the spirit of the house intact. The cooker was in the kitchen, though the refrigerator was gone. Curtains hung pleasantly in the windows, and it seemed that if she turned her head away and back, then the table where she had sat, where she had served her soup to her mother, sometimes to her mother’s guests, might reappear. The rest of the house was the same. In the bedrooms were the curtains she had known all her life, and the fitted carpets remained, but beds and cupboards had been spirited away. Alice went up to her room, and squatted down in the corner where her bed had been, the narrow white bed she had slept in since she was ten years old. On the window was a blue-and-red peacock she had stencilled there on a wet afternoon when the garden was blanked out with grey rain. A 1980 calendar hung on a wall; she had kept it because she liked the picture: Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère. She identified with that girl who stared out, trapped by bottles, tangerines, mirrors, the counter, a wall of people with ugly faces.
In the garden there was sunlight, and cats on a lawn that needed cutting.
She went downstairs, like a sleepwalker. Then, in a frenzy, having come awake, furious, betrayed, deadly, she tore down curtains from room after room, bundled them, and staggered out of the house, forgetting to lock the door, hardly able to walk under the load. She saw a woman looking from a window and thought: So what, they are mine, aren’t they? She managed to reach the corner, staggering. She stopped a taxi, returned in it to the house, made it wait while she ran in to drag down any other curtains that remained. Then she was driven back to the squat, where she spent all afternoon putting up her curtains where none had been, or replacing curtains for which she had no feeling. Anyway, these curtains were a thousand times better than the ones off the skips: lovely, real linen or silk or thick velvet, lined and interlined, fringed and tasselled.
How dare her mother give these away without even asking her, Alice?
When she went into the kitchen, Philip was there, and she knew from his manner that he had something to say.
It was that he had had printed a leaflet, which he was taking to hotels, restaurants, shops, advertising his firm, Philip Fowler, Builder and Decorator;
that he had to get real work, soon; that he thought he had contributed more than his share to this house, which was now in working order. If “they” wanted him to do any more, then he insisted on being paid; no, of course not at the proper rates, but enough to make it worth it.
The things that still needed to be done here were: Guttering to be replaced. Also a section of exterior drainpipe (he advised that this should be done soon, because the wall was badly soaked, and they were asking for dry rot). The cold-water tank in the attic was almost rusted through. In his opinion it might burst, flooding the house at any moment. The window sills were rotten on the top floor, and were letting in rain. And of course there was the question of the two rotten beams in the attic.
He laid before Alice a list of these necessities in order of urgency, the water tank being first.
Money. She would have to get some.
She sat a long time by herself, looking at the forsythia. It was wilting. Brilliant yellow petals lay on the floor. She went out, cut more branches, threw the dying ones away, and sat on through the afternoon, thinking.