Theresa stood heavily, her face in dragging lines, and she wore dark glasses, which left her eyes blinking and anxious when she took them off.
‘Oh Alice,’ she said, and walked fast to the chair near the drinks and collapsed. She fumbled as she poured herself a drink, and sat nursing the glass on her bosom, breathing slowly. Eyes shut. ‘Just a minute, Alice, just a minute, Alice dear,’ and as Anthony came in, moving his large bulk quickly to kiss her, she lifted her cheek to his lips, eyes shut, and said, ‘Thank God we closed early. Thank God, one more evening till eleven, and I’d be done for.’
He laid his hand on her shoulder, and pressed down. She smiled, with small pouting kissing movements, eyes tightclosed, and he went back to the kitchen, saying: ‘I’ve done some soup and a salad.’
‘Oh darling Anthony,’ said Theresa, ‘thank you – soup – it’s just what I need.’
What Alice felt then was a slicing cold pain – jealousy; but she did not know it was that, and she said, to be rid of the scene, rid of them, ‘You said I could have fifty pounds. Can I have it, Theresa?’
‘I expect so, darling,’ said Theresa vaguely. And in a moment she had sat up, had opened her smart bag, and was peering inside it. ‘Fifty,’ she said, ‘fifty, well, have I got it? Yes, just…’ And she fished out five ten-pound notes and handed them to Alice.
‘Thanks.’ Alice wanted to fly off with them, but felt graceless; she was full of affection for Theresa, who looked so tired and done, who had always been so good to her. ‘You are my favourite and my best, and my very best auntie,’ she said, with an awkward smile, as she had, when she was little, and they played this game.
Theresa’s eyes were open and she looked straight into Alice’s. ‘Alice,’ she said, ‘Alice, my dear…’ She sighed. Sat up. Stroked her deep-red skirt. Put up a white little hand to smooth her soft dark hair. Dyed, of course. ‘Your poor mother,’ said Theresa. ‘She rang me this morning. She was so upset, Alice.’
‘She was upset,’ said Alice at once. ‘She was.’
Theresa sighed. ‘Alice, why do you stick with him, with Jasper, why – no, wait, don’t run off. You’re so pretty and nice, my love – ‘ here she seemed to offer that kind face of hers to Alice, as if in a kiss. ‘You are such a good girl, Alice, why can’t you choose yourself someone – you should have a real relationship with someone,’ she ended awkwardly, because of Alice’s coldly contemptuous face.
‘I love Jasper,’ she said. ‘I love him. Why don’t you understand? I don’t care – about what you care about. Love isn’t just sex. That’s what you think, I know…’
But the years of affection, of love, dragged at her tongue, and she felt tears rushing down her face. ‘Oh Theresa,’ she cried, ‘thank you. Thank you. I’ll come in to see you soon. I’ll come. I must go, they are waiting…’ And she ran to the door, sobbing violently, and out of the door, letting it crash. Down the stairs she pounded, tears flying off her face, into the street, and there she remembered the notes in her hand, in danger of being blown away or snatched. She put them carefully into the pocket of her jacket, and walked fast and safely to the Underground.
Meanwhile, back in the beautiful flat, they were discussing Alice. Anthony kept up a humorous quizzical look, until Theresa responded with, ‘What is it, my love?’
‘Some girl,’ he said, the dislike he felt for Alice sounding in his voice.
‘Yes, yes, I know…’ she said irritably – her exhaustion was beginning to tell.
‘A girl – how old is she now?’
She shrugged, not wanting to be bothered with it, but interested, all the same. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘One keeps forgetting.’
‘Nearly forty?’ insisted Anthony.
‘Oh no, she can’t be!’
A pause, while the steam from the plate of soup he had brought her, and had set on the little table beside her, ascended between them. Through the steam, they looked at each other.
‘Thirty-five, no thirty-six,’ she said flatly at last.
‘Arrested development,’ said Anthony firmly, insisting on his right to dislike Alice.
‘Oh yes, I expect so, but darling Alice, well, she’s a sweet girl – a sweet thing, really.’
In Alice’s little street the houses were full of lights and people, the kerbs crammed with cars of the returned from work; and her house loomed at the end, dark, powerful, silent, mysterious, defined by the lights and the din of the main road beyond. As she arrived at the gate, she saw three figures about to go into the dark entrance. Jasper, Bert. And the third? – Alice ran up, and Jasper and Bert turned sharply to face possible danger, saw her, and said to the boy they had with them, ‘Philip, it is all right, this is Alice. Comrade Alice, you know.’ They were in the hall, and Alice saw this was not a boy, but a slight, pale young man, with great blue eyes between sheaves of glistening pale hair that seemed to reflect all the dim light from the hurricane lamp. Her first reaction was, But he’s ill, he’s not strong enough! For she had understood this was her saviour, the restorer of the house.
Philip said, facing her, with a stubbornness she recognized as the result of effort, a push against odds, ‘But I’ve got to charge for it. I can’t do it for nothing.’
‘Fifty pounds,’ said Alice, and saw a slight involuntary movement towards her from Jasper, which told her that he would have it off her, if she wasn’t careful.
Philip said, in the same soft, stubborn voice, ‘I want to see the job first. I have to cost it.’
She knew that this one had often been cheated out of what was due to him. Looking as he did, a brave little orphan, he invited it! She said, maternally and proudly, ‘We’re not asking for favours. This is a job.’
‘For fifty pounds,’ said Bert, with jocular brutality, ‘you can just about expect to get a mousehole blocked up. These days.’ And she saw his red lips gleam in the black thickets of his face. Jasper sniggered.
This line-up of the two men against her – for it was momentarily that – pleased her. She had even been thinking as she raced home that if Bert turned out to be one of the men that Jasper attached himself to, as had happened before, like a younger brother, showing a hungry need that made her heart ache for him, then he wouldn’t be off on his adventures. These always dismayed her, not out of jealousy – she insisted fiercely to herself, and sometimes to others – but because she was afraid that one day there might be a bad end to them. Once or twice men encountered by Jasper during these excursions into a world that he might tell her about, his grip tightening around her wrist as he bent to stare into her face looking for signs of weakness, had arrived at this squat or that, to be met by her friendly, sisterly helpfulness.
‘Jasper? He’ll be back this evening. Do you want to wait for him?’ But they went off again. But when there was a man around, like Bert, to whom he could attach himself, then he did not go off cruising. A word she herself used casually. ‘Were you cruising last night, Jasper? Do be careful, you know it’s bad enough with Old Bill on our backs for political reasons.’ This was the hold she had over him; the check she could use. He would reply in a proud, comradely voice, ‘You are quite right, Alice. But I know my way around.’ And he might give her one of his sudden, real smiles, rare enough, that acknowledged they were allies in a desperate war.
Now she smiled briefly at Jasper and Bert, and turned her attention to Philip. ‘The most important thing,’ she said, ‘is the lavatories. I’ll show you.’
She