"I'm going to my father's," she said again, slowly, still puzzling over that message from her buried self, which sang in her fingertips and up her arm.
She went slowly down the path to the gate, turned into the main road for the Underground, still dreamwalking, still caught in a web of intimations, reminders, promptings. She even put her seduced fingers to her nose and sniffed them, seeming even more puzzled and dismayed. She understood she was standing on the pavement with people walking past, the traffic rushing up and down - had been standing there, stock-still, for how long? She could not help glancing back at number 43, in case Jasper was spying on her. He was. She caught a glimpse of his paleness at the window of the bathroom on the first floor. But he at once disappeared.
Her energies came back at her in a rush, with the thought that now, having all that money, Jasper would be off somewhere, and if she wanted to catch him, she must hurry.
At C. Mellings, Printers and Stationers, she went straight through the shop and upstairs, and into her father's room. He sat behind his big desk, and Jill the secretary sat at her table opposite him across the room. Alice stood in front of her father and said, "Why did you sack Jim? Why did you? That was a shitty bloody fascist thing to do. It was only because he was black, that's all."
Cedric Mellings, on seeing his daughter, had gone red, had gone pale. Now he sat forward, weight on his forearms, hands clenched.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"What? Because you sacked Jim, how dare you do it? It was unfair!" And Alice kicked the front of the desk, hard, several times.
"I gave Jim Mackenzie a job, because it has always been our policy to employ blacks, Indians, anyone. We have always operated a nonracial policy here. As you know very well. But I should have known better than to accept anyone recommended by you."
His voice was now low and bitter, and he looked ill. "Just go away, Alice. Just get out, will you, I've had all I can take of you."
"Will you listen," she shrieked. "Jim didn't take that money. I took it. How can you be so stupid?" This last she addressed to Jill. "I was in this office, wasn't I? Are you blind or stupid or something?"
Jill stood up, and papers, biros, went flying. She stared, as pale as her employer, and dumb.
"Don't speak to Jill like that," said Cedric Mellings. "How dare you just come in here and... What do you mean, you took the money, how could you..." Here he put his head into his hands and groaned.
Jill made a sick sort of noise and went out to the lavatory.
Alice sat down in the chair opposite her father's and waited for him to recover.
"You took that money?" he asked at last.
"Well, of course I took it. I was here, wasn't I? Didn't Jill tell you?"
"It didn't cross my mind. And it didn't hers. Why should it?"
Now he sat back, eyes closed, trying to pull himself together. His hands trembled, lying on the desk.
Seeing this, Alice felt a little spurt of triumph, then pity. She was glad of this opportunity to look at him unobserved.
She had always thought of her father as attractive, even handsome, though she knew not everyone did. Her mother, for instance, had been wont to call him "Sandman" in critical moods.
Cedric was a solid, tending-to-fat man, pale of skin, lightly freckled, with short fair hair that looked reddish in some lights. His eyes were blue. Alice was really rather proud of his story, his career.
Cedric Mellings was the youngest of several children. The family came from near Newcastle. There were Scottish connections. Cedric's grandfather was a clergyman. His father was a journalist and far from rich. All the children had had to work hard to become educated, and launched. Cedric had been just too young for the war, and for this he had never forgiven Fate.
Unlike his brothers, he did not seem able to get himself together; wasted his time at university, married very young, came to London, did this job and that; wrote a book that was noticed but made no money, then another, a jaunty and irreverent account of a journalist's career in the provinces. This was based on his father's life, and it did well enough to bring in five thousand pounds, a lot of money in the mid-fifties. He saw - Dorothy advising and supporting him - that this was a chance that might not recur. He bought a small printing firm that had gone bankrupt, and because of contacts in the Labour Party and all kinds of left-wing political groups, soon had a bread-and-butter basis of pamphlets, brochures, tracts, leaflets, and then a couple of small newspapers. The firm flourished with the good times of the sixties, and Cedric started the stationer's as a speculation, but it at once did well. The family thankfully left the small shabby flat in Stockwell, and bought a comfortable house in Hampstead. Good times! That was what they all remembered of the sixties, the golden age when everything came so easily. Times of easy friendships, jobs, opportunities, money; people dropping in and out, long family meals around an enormous table in the big kitchen, achievements at school, parties, holidays all over the Continent.
Cedric Mellings had an affair or two, and then so did Dorothy Mellings. Shocks, storms, rages, accusations; long family discussions, the children much involved, things patched up and smoothed over, the family united. But by then the children were growing, growing up, grown, going, going, gone - Alice up north, back to her father's territory, though at first she did not see this.
Cedric Mellings and Dorothy Mellings were alone in the too-large house. Which did not cease to be full of visitors coming and going, eating and drinking. Cedric fell in love with Jane. He went off to live with her. Dorothy remained in the large house.
All gone. Blown away, and gone, the good times, the easy jobs, even, it seemed, the accomplishment, the friends, affection, money.
Cedric and Dorothy had seemed a centre, even an essential one; so many well-known people had been in and out with their politics, books, causes, marches for this and that, demonstrations. There had seemed to be a shine or gloss on Cedric and Dorothy, an aura or atmosphere about them, of success, of confidence. But then... what had happened to all that? Cedric with Jane was a very different matter! For one thing, a much smaller house, because, after all, C. Mellings, Printers and Stationers, had to support two establishments; Cedric and Jane's house did not have that elusive but unmistakable atmosphere of ease, of success. Dorothy, left in the bigger house, alone for a time and later with Alice and Jasper, seemed to have fewer friends. Certainly those who came for a meal with Dorothy Mellings - while Alice was there, with Jasper - tended to come in ones or twos, mostly women, perhaps needing Dorothy's advice, or even to borrow money; divorced friends - so many of the couples that had been to the Mellingses' in the good days, had split up. Or a couple, who talked a lot about how things had been, and how they weren't the same now. If Dorothy gave a party, and it was only a small party, it was an effort, and she appeared to be tired of it all, to have forgotten how, in the sixties and early seventies, parties just happened. They took the house over and sucked in people from everywhere and telephones rang with careless invitations and orders to wine merchants and grocers.