The Good Terrorist

‘What could she say that would make such a difference?’ Pat persisted.

‘If she said, they are a bunch of Reds, Bob Hood would soon find a reason to have us kicked out. She doesn’t care, because she’s one herself.’

‘That girl is a revolutionary?’ asked Bert, laughing.

‘She’s a Trotskyist. Of a sort. Or she was one.’

‘Then how can they come and live here, Alice?’ said Bert, firm but kind.

‘I don’t think she’s anything much, at the moment. Ideologically. And anyway,’ Alice persisted, courageously, knowing what this argument of hers had cost her in the past, earning her all kinds of accusations, ‘in a sense, aren’t we? After all, we don’t say that Trotsky never existed! We give him full credit for his achievements. We say that it was Lenin who was the real workers’ Leader, and then the comrades there took a wrong turning with Stalin. If saying that Trotsky was a good comrade and he took the wrong turning makes you a Trot, then I don’t see why we aren’t? Anyway, I don’t seem to remember we actually defined our line on Trotsky. Not in the CCU, anyway.’

‘Oh Alice,’ said Jasper, with the finality of superiority, ‘ideology is simply not your line.’

‘Well,’ said Pat, having exchanged efficient looks with Bert, ‘I for one don’t think this is the moment to define our attitude to Comrade Trotsky. There is something in what Alice says. That’s not the point. My point is that this business of having a nice clean house and a roof over our heads is beginning to define us. It is what we do.’

‘It’s taken four days,’ said Alice, ‘four days,’ and she was appealing for justice.

‘Yes, but now it looks as if we are going to have two new people here just to keep the house.’

Jim said, ‘Why don’t we ask them to join the CCU? I’m going to join.’

‘Well, why not?’ said Bert, after a considerable pause. Alice saw him and Jasper exchange a long thoughtful look. She knew they were thinking that perhaps they should go next door to ask someone, who? for advice. Or instruction.

She said, ‘We must decide tonight. The meeting is tomorrow.’ And now she did have her look. Her voice told her so; and told the others, who turned to see how she sat swelling and suffering there.

Bert and Jasper still sat gazing at each other in an abstracted way. What they were doing, in fact, was playing back in their minds what had been said by someone next door, and wondering how to fit this situation into it.

Bert said, ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t ask them to join. We keep saying we want to recruit. It sounds to me as if these two might be ripe. With a bit of political education…’ And on these words he and Jasper got up, as one, and went out, Jasper remarking, ‘We’ll be back in a minute.’

Pat said, ‘And I’m off. I’m off to visit someone.’

‘But don’t you want to meet Mary and Reggie?’

Pat shrugged, smiled and left. Alice was reminded – as, she was sure, Pat had intended – that Pat did not really care, was going to leave anyway.

Remained Alice and Jim and Philip.

Soon in came Mary, with a man of whom Alice found herself thinking, at first glance, Well, of course! – meaning that he and Mary were a pair. Not in looks, for he was a tall, knobbly-looking man, with very white skin, small black eyes under strong black brows, and dense, very fine black hair. He would be bald early. Where he matched with Mary was in an air of measure, of common sense ordered by what was due. Due, that is, to their surroundings, their fellows, to society. Alice was looking, and she knew it, at respectability. It was not that she did not value this type of good sense; but it was not the kind of sense that would be appropriate here, in this household. It was with an infinite feeling of tolerance she allowed that other people had need of these struts and supports. She was thinking, Good God, they were born to be two nice little bourgeois in a nice little house. They’ll be worrying about their pensions next.

Seeing them together, she felt, simply, that a mistake was being made. They should not be here. Alone with Mary, she liked her. Seeing her with her mate Reggie, Alice felt alienated, with the beginnings of a strong hostility.

‘Sit down,’ she smiled. And she put the saucepan on the stove and switched on the electricity. A pity, a gas stove would be so much better. Well, they would find one on a skip, or even get a reconditioned one for ten pounds or so.

She turned to see Reggie examining Jim, and thought, With a bit of luck he’s colour-prejudiced, and won’t want to be here. But no such luck, he seemed to like Jim. Or, if he didn’t like blacks, his manner said nothing about that. Of course, thought Alice, this lot, the bloody middle classes, you’d find out nothing from their manner, politeness is all. But 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…

She woke when Jasper did, at seven, but lay still, watching him from nearly-closed eyes. His wiry body was full of the energy of expectation. Everything from his gingery hair (which she thought of privately as cinnamon-coloured) to his small deft feet, which she adored, because they were so white and slender, was alive. He seemed to dance his way into his clothes, and his pale face was innocent and sweet, when he stood momentarily at the window, to see what the weather was like for the day’s picketing. There was an exalted dreamy look to him, as he went past the apparently sleeping Alice to the door. He did not look at her.

She relaxed, lay on her back, and listened. He knocked next door, and she heard Bert’s reluctant response, and Pat’s prompt, ‘Right, we’re awake.’ Then the knock on Roberta’s and Faye’s door. Philip? Oh, not Philip, she needed him here! But there was no other knock, and then she began worrying: I hope Philip won’t feel left out, despised? A knock on the door of the room immediately below this one; the big room that was Jim’s, though it was really a living-room, and should perhaps be used as such…No, that was not fair. A startled shout from Jim; but she could not decide whether he was pleased to be roused, or not.

The sounds of the house coming to life. She could go down if she wanted, could sit with the cheerful group and send them on their way with smiles, but her mouth was dry and her eyes pricked. For some reason – a dream perhaps? – she wanted to weep, go back to sleep. To give up. She distrusted what she felt; for it had been with her since she could remember: being excluded, left out. Unwanted. And that was silly, because all she had to do was to say she was going too. But how could she, when their fate, the fate of them all, would be decided that morning at the Council, and it was by no means certain the house was theirs. When Mary had gone off saying, ‘I’ll do my best,’ it meant no more than that. Alice brought Bob Hood to life in her mind’s eye, and, staring at the correct, judicious young man, willed him to do what she wanted. ‘Put our case,’ she said to him. ‘Make them let us have it. It’s our house.’ She kept this up for some minutes, while listening to how the others moved about the kitchen. Almost at once, though, they were out of the house. They were going to breakfast in a café. That was silly, raged Alice: wasting all that money! Eating at home was what they would have to learn to do. She would mention it, have it out with them.

Oh, she did feel low and sad.

For some reason she thought of her brother Humphrey, and the familiar incredulous rage took hold of her. How could he be content to play their game? A nice safe little job – aircraft controller, who would have thought anyone would choose to spend his life like that! And her mother had said he had written to announce a child. The first, he had said. Suddenly Alice thought: That means I am an aunt. It had not occurred to her before. Her rage vanished, and she thought, Well, perhaps I’ll go and see the baby. She lay smiling there for some time, in a silent house, though the din from the traffic encompassed it. Then, consciously pulling herself together, with a set look on her face, she rolled out of the sleeping-bag, pulled on her jeans, and went downstairs. On the kitchen table were five unwashed coffee-cups – they had taken time for coffee, so that meant they hadn’t gone to the café; they would have a picnic on the train again; no, don’t think about that. She washed up the cups, thinking, I’ve got to organize something for hot water – it used to come off the gas, but of course the Council workmen stole the boiler. We can’t afford a new one. A second-hand one? Philip will know where and how…today he will fix the windows, if I get the glass. He said he needed another morning for the slates. Seven windows – what is that going to cost, for glass!

She took out the money that was left: less than a hundred pounds. And with everything to be bought, to be paid for…Jasper said he would get her Social Security, but of course, she couldn’t complain, he worked really hard yesterday, getting all that good stuff from the skips. At this moment she saw, on the windowsill, an envelope with ‘Alice’ scribbled on it, and under that ‘Have a nice day!’ And under that ‘Love, Jasper’. Her money was in it. She quickly checked: he had been known to keep half, saying: We must make sacrifices for the sake of the future. But there were four ten-pound notes there.

She sat at the table, soft with love and gratitude. He did love her. He did. And he did these wonderful, sweet things.

She sat relaxed, at the head of the great wooden table. If they wanted to sell it, they could get fifty for it, more. The kitchen was a long room, not very wide. The table stood near a window that had a broad sill. From the table she could see the tree, the place where she and Jim had buried the shit, now a healthy stretch of dark earth, and the fence beyond which was Joan Robbins’s house. It was a tall wood fence, and shrubs showed above it, in bud. A yellow splodge of forsythia. Birds. The cat sneaked up the fence, and opened its mouth in a soundless miaow, looking at her. She opened the window that sparkled in the sun, and the cat came in to the sill, drank some milk and ate scraps, and sat for a while, its experienced eyes on Alice. Then it began licking itself.

It was in poor condition, and should be taken to the vet.

All these things that must be done. Alice knew that she would do none of them, until she heard from Mary. She would sit here, by herself, doing nothing. Funny, she was described as unemployed, she had never had a job, and she was always busy. To sit quietly, just thinking, a treat, that. To be by oneself – nice. Guilt threatened to invade with this thought: it was disloyalty to her friends. She didn’t want to be like her mother who was selfish. She used to nag and bitch to have an afternoon to herself: the children had to lump it. Privacy. That lot made such a thing about privacy; 99 per cent of the world’s population wouldn’t know the word. If they had ever heard it. No, it was better like this, healthy, a group of comrades. Sharing. But at this, worry started to nibble and nag, and she was thinking: That’s why I am so upset this morning. It’s Mary, it’s Reggie. They are simply not like us. They will never really let go and meld with us, they’ll stay a couple. They’ll have private viewpoints about the rest of us. Well then, that was true of Roberta and Faye, a couple; they made it clear they had their own attitudes and opinions. They did not like what was happening now, with the house. And Bert and Pat? No, they did not have a little opinion of their own set against the others; but Pat was only here at all because she actually enjoyed being screwed (the right word for it!). Jim? Philip? She and Jasper? When you got down to it, she and Jasper were the only genuine revolutionaries here. Appalled by this thought, she nevertheless examined it. What about Bert? Jasper approved of him. Jasper’s attachments to men who were like elder brothers had nothing to do with their politics but with their natures; they had always been the same type, easy-going. Kind. That was it. Bert was a good person. But was he a revolutionary? It’s unfair to say that Faye and Roberta are not real revolutionaries just because I don’t like them, thought Alice…where were these thoughts getting her? What was the point? The group, her family, lay in its parts, diminished, criticized out of existence. Alice sat alone, even thinking, Well, if we don’t get the house, we’ll go down to the squat in Brixton.

A sound upstairs, immediately above. Faye and Roberta: they had not gone with the others. Alice listened to how they got themselves awake and up: stirrings, and the slithering sound the sleeping-bags made on the bare boards; a laugh, a real giggle. Silence. Then footsteps and they were coming into the kitchen.

Alice got up to put the saucepan on the heat, and sat down. The two smelled ripe; sweaty and female. They were not going to wash in cold water, not these two!

The two women, smiling at Alice, sat together with their backs to the stove, where they could look out of the window and see the morning’s sun.

Knowing that she was going to have to, Alice made herself tell about last night, about Mary and Reggie. She did not soften it at all. The other two sat side by side, waiting for their coffee, not looking at each other, for which Alice was grateful. She saw appear on their faces the irony that she heard in her own voice.

‘So the CCU has two recruits?’ said Roberta, and burst out laughing.

‘They are good people,’ said Alice reprovingly. But she laughed too.

Faye did not laugh, but little white teeth held a pink lower lip, her shining brown brows frowned, and the whole of her person announced her disapproval. Roberta stopped laughing.

Hey, thought Alice, I’ve seen this before: you’d think it was Roberta who was the strong one; she comes on so butch-motherly, she’s like a hen with one chick, but no, it’s Faye who’s the one, never mind about all her pretty bitchy little ways. And she looked carefully and with respect at Faye, who was about to pronounce. And Roberta waited too.

‘Listen, Alice, now you listen, you listen carefully, for I am about to say my piece…’ And Alice could see it was hard for her to assert herself, that this was why she had so many little tricks and turns, little poutings and hesitations and small wary glances and little smiles at Roberta and at herself, but underneath she was iron, she was formidable. ‘Once and for all, I do not care about all this domestic bliss, all the house and garden stuff…’ Here she waited, politely, while first Roberta and then Alice – seeing that Roberta did – laughed. ‘Well, for me it is all pretty classy stuff,’ said Faye, ‘this house would have seemed a palace to me once. I’ve lived in at least a thousand squats, dens, holes, corners, rooms, hovels and residences, and this is the best yet. And I don’t care.’ Here she pettishly, humorously, wagged a finger at Alice. Roberta had her eyes on her love’s face, exactly like an elder sister; is she going to go too far? Too far, Alice knew, with all this presentation, the manner, the means that enabled Faye to say her piece. Roberta did not want Alice to think that this girl was frivolous or silly.

Well, she certainly did not.

‘Any minute now we are going to have hot running water and double glazing, I wouldn’t be surprised. For me this is all a lot of shit, do you hear? Shit!’

Alice got up, poured boiling water into the three mugs that already had coffee powder in them, set the mugs on the table, put the milk bottle and the sugar near Faye. She did this as something of a demonstration and saw that as Faye stretched out her hand for the coffee, which she was going to drink black and bitter, she knew it, and even appreciated it, judging from her quick shrewd little smile. But she was going on, with determination. She had also lost her cockney self, and the voice that went with it.

It was in all-purpose BBC English that she went on, ‘I don’t care about that, Alice. Don’t you see? If you want to wait on me, then do. If you don’t, don’t. I don’t care, either way.’

Roberta said quickly, protectively, ‘Faye has had a terrible life, such an awful shitty terrible life…’ And her voice broke and she turned her face away.

‘Yes, I did,’ said Faye, ‘but don’t make a thing of it. I don’t.’ Roberta shook her head, unable to speak, and put her hand, tentatively, ready to be rejected, on Faye’s arm. Faye said, ‘If you are going to tell Alice about my ghastly childhood then tell her but not when I am here.’

She drank gulps of the bitter coffee, grimaced, reached for a biscuit, took a neat sharp bite out of it, and crunched it up, as if it were a dose of medicine. Another gulp of caffeine. Roberta had her face averted. Alice knew that she was infinitely sorrowful about something; if not Faye’s past, then Faye’s present: her hand, ignored by Faye, had dropped from Faye’s arm, and crept back into her own lap, where it lay trembling and pitiful, and her lowered head with its crop of black silvered curls made Alice think of a humbly loving dog’s. Roberta was radiating love and longing. At this moment, at least, Faye did not need Roberta, but Roberta was dying of need for Faye.

Faye probably has times when she wants to be free of Roberta, finds it all too much – yes, that’s it. Well, I bet Roberta never wants to be free of Faye! Oh God, all this personal stuff, getting in the way of everything all the time. Well, at least Jasper and I have got it all sorted out.