“But do you know that it is only in this borough—well, one or two others. In Lampton, for instance, you’d have to supply electricity to us. If people demand it, then it must be supplied.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Whitfield mildly, “you seem to know the situation as well as I do! I do not make policy. I implement it. The policy in this borough is that there has to be a guarantor.”
But her eyes, large, soft, and blue, were direct on Alice’s face and not combative or hostile, far from it; she seemed to be appealing for Alice to come up with something.
“My father will guarantee payment,” said Alice. “I am sure of that.”
Mrs. Whitfield had already started to fill in the form. “Then that’s all right,” she said. “His name? His address? His telephone number? And we have to have a deposit.”
Alice took out ten pounds and laid it on the desk. She knew it was not enough. Mrs. Whitfield looked at it cautiously, and signed. She did not look at Alice. A bad sign. She did not take the note. Then 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 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 the way 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 recognise; 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 worthwhile.
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, which, though you could turn them between your fingers for as long as you liked, would not yield, give up their secrets, submit.
Alice never read anything but newspapers.
As a child she had been teased: 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 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,” had said Dorothy Mellings, 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 on like this.”
Alice was feeling sick. Very. She was going to vomit if she wasn’t careful. She sat, very still, eyes squeezed tight, concentrating on not being sick.
She heard Pat’s voice. “Alice. Alice. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, in a hurried, low voice, still concentrating, “it’s all right.” In a minute or two she opened her eyes and said, normally, and as though nothing at all had happened, “I am afraid of the police crashing in suddenly.” This was what she had come to say.
“The police? Why, what do you mean?”
“We’ve got to decide. We have to make a decision. Suppose they come crashing in.”
“We’ve survived it before.”
“No, I mean, those pails, all those pails. We daren’t empty them into the system. Not all at once. We daren’t. God knows what the pipes are like down there where we can’t see them. If we empty them one at a time, one a day let’s say, it’ll take forever. But if we dug a pit …”
“The neighbours,” said Pat at once.
“I’ll talk to the woman next door.”
“I can’t see Joan Robbins being mad with joy.”
“But it will be the end of it, won’t it? And they would all be pleased about that.”
“It would mean you, me, and Jim.”
“Yes, I know. I’ll go across to the Robbins woman. You ask Jim.”
A pause. Pat yawned, wriggled around in her chair, lifted her book, let it drop again, and then said, “I suppose so.”
In the next garden, which was wide, divided by a crunching gravel path, Joan Robbins worked on a border with a fork. Under a tree on the other side sat a very old woman, staring at the sky.
Joan Robbins stood up when Alice appeared, looking defensive and got at. But Alice did not give her time for grievance. She said, “Mrs. Robbins, can we keep the tools for a bit? We want to dig a pit. A big one. For rubbish.”
Joan Robbins, who had withstood the annoyances of this dreadful number 43 for so long, looked as if she would say no, say she had had enough of it all. Her pleasant face was irritable, and flushed.
But now the old woman under the tree sat up in the chair, leaned forward, staring. Her face was gaunt and purplish, with white woolly hair sticking out around it. She said in a thick, old, unsteady voice, “You dirty people.”
“No,” said Alice steadily. “No, we’re not. We’re cleaning it all up.”
“Nasty dirty people,” said the old woman, less certain of herself, having taken in Alice, such a nice girl, standing on the green lawn with daffodils behind her.
Alice said, “Your mother?”
“Sitting tenant. Upstairs flat,” said Mrs. Robbins, not moderating her voice, and Alice understood the situation in a flash. She went over to the old woman and said, “How do you do? I’m Alice Mellings. I’ve just moved into forty-three, and we’re fixing the place up, and getting the rubbish out.”
The old woman sank back, her eyes seeming to glaze with the effort of it all.
“Good-bye,” said Alice. “See you again soon,” and went back to Mrs. Robbins, who asked sullenly, “What are you going to bury?,” indicating the ranks and ranks of filled shiny black sacks.
She knew!
Alice said, “It’ll get rid of all the smell all at once. We thought, get the pit dug this afternoon, and get rid of everything tonight … once and for all.”
“It’s terrible,” said Mrs. Robbins, tearful. “This is such a nice street.”
“By this time tomorrow the rubbish will be all gone. The smell will be gone.”
“And what about the other house. What about forty-five? In summer, the flies! It shouldn’t be allowed. The police got them out once but … they are back again.”
She could have said
you;
and Alice persisted, “If we start digging now …”
Joan Robbins said, “Well, I suppose if you dig deep enough …”
Alice flew back home. In the room where she had first seen him, Jim was tapping his drums. He at first did not smile, then did, because it was his nature, but said, “Yes, and the next thing, they’ll say Jim, you must leave,” he accused.
“No, they won’t,” said Alice, making another promise.
He got up, followed her; they found Pat in the hall. In the part of the garden away from the main road, concealed from it by the house, was a place under a tree that had once been a compost heap. There they began digging, while over the hedge Mrs. Robbins was steadily working at her border, not looking at them. But she was their barrier against the rest of the busybody street, which of course was looking through its windows at them, gossiping, even thinking it was time to ring the police again.
The earth was soft. They came on the skeleton of a large dog; two old pennies; a broken knife; a rusting garden fork, which would be quite useful when cleaned up; and then a bottle … another bottle. Soon they were hauling out bottles, bottles, bottles. Whisky and brandy and gin, bottles of all sizes, hundreds, and they were standing to waist level in an earthy sweet-smelling pit with bottles rolling and standing around the rim for yards, years of hangovers, oblivion, for someone.
People were coming home from work, were standing and looking, were making comments. One man said unpleasantly: “Burying a corpse?”
“Old Bill’ll be around,” said Jim, bitter, experienced.
“Oh, God, these bottles,” swore Pat, and Alice said, “The bottle bank. If we had a car … Who has a car?”
“They have one next door.”
“Forty-five? Would they lend it?
We have to get rid of these bottles.”
“Oh, God,
Alice,”
said Pat, but she stood her spade against the house wall—beyond which was the sitting room where they knew Jasper and Bert were, talking—and went out into the side street and then the main street. She was back in a minute, in an old Toyota. They spread empty black plastic sacks on the seats, filled the car with bottles: to the roof at the back, the boot, the pit in front near the driver, leaving only that seat, into which Alice squatted, while Pat drove the car down to the big cement containers, where they worked for three-quarters of an hour, smashing in the bottles.