The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

meaning it, but there was mockery, too. And there was a warning, which she did not hear, or care about.
    “Philip,” she was saying, “Philip, we’ve got the water, now the electricity.” And, in silence, Philip looked gently, stubbornly at her, this frail boy—no, man, for he was twenty-five, so she had learned among all the other things about him she needed to know—and suddenly they were all silent, because they had been discussing, while she and Philip worked, how much this was going to cost and how much they would contribute.
    Philip said, “If you had called in a plumber, do you know what you would have had to pay?”
    “A couple of hundred,” supplied Pat, tentatively, who, without interfering in this delicate operation—Alice and Philip and the house—had been more involved than the others, following the stages of the work as they were accomplished, and commenting, telling how thus she, too, had done in this place and that.
    Alice took the fifty pounds from her pocket and gave them to Philip.
    “I’ll get my Social day after tomorrow,” she said. He stood, turning over the notes, five of them, thinking, she knew, that this was a familiar position for him to be in. Then he looked up, smiled at her, and said briefly, “I’ll come in tomorrow morning. I need to do the electrics in daylight.”
    And he left, accompanied not by his mate, Bert, who had brought him here, but by Alice, and she went with him to the gate, the rubbish malodorous around them.
    He said, with his sweet, painful smile, which already tore her heart, “Well, at least it’s for comrades.” And walked off along the street, where the houses stood darker now that people had gone to bed. It was after one.
    She went into the deserted hall and heard the lavatory flushing. Held her breath, standing there, thinking,
The pipes
 … But they seemed to be all right. Jasper came out and said to her, “I’m going to sleep.”
    “Where?”
    This was a delicate moment. In her mother’s house, Jasper had had his own place, appropriating her brother’s room, in which he curled himself up, a hedgehog, guarding his right to be alone at nights. She, daughter of the house, had slept in the room she had had all her life. She did not mind, she said; she knew what she felt; but what she did mind, badly, was the thoughts of others, not about her, but about Jasper. But they were alone in the hall, could face this decision together. He was gazing at her with the quelling look she knew meant he felt threatened.
    Pat came out to them, saying, “The room next to ours is empty. It probably needs a bit of a clean; the two who were in it weren’t …”
    In the great dark hall, where the hurricane lamp made its uncertain pool, the three stood, and the women looked at Jasper, Alice knowing why, but Pat not yet. Alice knew that Pat, quick and acute, would understand it all in a flash … and suddenly Pat remarked, “Well, at any rate, it’s the best empty room there is.…” She had taken it all in, in a moment, Alice knew, but it seemed Jasper did not, for he said heartily, “Right, Alice, let’s go.”
    Pat said to them, as they silently went up, “Alice, don’t think we don’t think you aren’t a bloody marvel!” And laughed. Alice, not giving a damn, went into the big empty room behind Jasper. His backpack had been undone; his sleeping bag lay neatly against the right wall at the end, as far away as it could get. Alice said, “I’ll fetch my things,” waited for him to repudiate her, but he stood, back turned, saying nothing. She ran down to the hall, hoping Pat would not be there, but she was, standing quietly by herself, as though she had expected Alice to come down, wanting to do whatshe then did, which was to advance, take Alice in her arms, and lay her smooth cherry cheek against Alice’s. Comfort. Comradely reassurance. And a compassion, too, Alice felt, wishing she could say out loud, “But I don’t
mind
, you don’t