"Of course she is crying," said Roberta. "Of course she is. She is tired." She put her arm around Alice and took her to the door. "Don't do anything we wouldn't do when we've gone," she said facetiously to them all, but her eyes were on Faye, who, betrayed, tossed her head and would not look at Roberta; she had suddenly again become a cockney maiden.
The two women were at the hospital for some hours, signing forms, seeing appropriate officials. Alice agreed to get a death certificate. She arranged to go through Philip's possessions with a Council representative, who would come tomorrow.
At midnight, Roberta tucked her up with a cup of hot chocolate, making it clear that that was it: she did not feel obliged to do more for Philip, though she would if Faye were not so needful.
Alice spent the morning over the death certificate and the afternoon going through Philip's possessions, with the official. It was an awful, painful business. Philip owned a few clothes, and about five hundred pounds in the post office, which would go to pay for his funeral.
As for his ladders and equipment, Alice said nothing about them, so they, at least, would not be sold to some dealer for a tenth of their value. They - in number 43 - now at least owned their own ladders, trestles, and tools. For what that was worth; for as long as that was worth anything.
Because of Alice's preoccupation with the disposition of Philip, the household marked time. Rather, all did save Jocelin, who was at work in an upstairs room on a variety of devices that she was concocting out of the books she referred to as "recipe books," which gave admirable and concise advice about making explosive devices. She had purloined some of the materiel on its way through number 45. Alice, with the others, saw these devices, on Jocelin's invitation. They were ranged on one of Philip's trestles in a locked room-locked because of Mary and Reggie, who, though moving out in a few days, were not yet gone. What struck Alice about the things Jocelin had made was that they looked so unimportant and even flimsy, were mere assemblages of bits of this and that. Electronic devices that Jocelin was clearly proud of seemed no more portentous than those fragments of minuscule circuitry that appear when the insides of a transistor radio are broken apart.
There were also paper clips, drawing pins, a couple of cheap watches, bits of wire, household chemicals, copper tubing of various sizes, ball bearings, tin tacks, packets of plastic explosive, old-fashioned dynamite, reels of thick cotton, string.
While Jocelin worked with relish ("enjoyment" was not a word for Jocelin) at these little toys, and Alice wept over Philip - for she felt now as if she had lost an old friend, even a brother - Jasper and Bert went to some demonstrations, admonished by the others on no account to get themselves arrested, for there was important work to be done; and Roberta took Faye to stay with a friend at Brighton, because the sea air would do Faye some good. Roberta's mother was still in a coma.
A day passed slowly. The house seemed empty. Alice found herself thinking that Roberta and Faye probably would be back that night. Would they like to be welcomed by a real meal, even a feast? While she worried about this, sitting in the kitchen with the cat, Caroline came in with carrier bags full of food. She was smooth and sleek with pleasure; she said she felt like cooking a real meal; no, Alice must sit where she was and for once allow herself to be waited on.
Until then only Alice had brought in food. Real food, that is, not a pizza or some portions of chips. Only Alice had trudged in with loads of fruit, of vegetables, had stacked the refrigerator with butter and milk, piled a cupboard with pastas and pulses. Now she sat gratefully watching Caroline, who worked smiling, full of a rich secret contentment that seemed to spill out over her, like candlelight. Alice felt meagre, dry; she did these things, cooked and fed and nurtured, but it was out of having to, a duty. She had never in her life felt what she saw brimming over in Caroline, who, as she licked a spoon to test a sauce, looked at Alice over it as though she were sharing some pleasure with her that only the rare, the initiated, of the world could even suspect. And then she lifted a spoon over to Alice, carefully, guarding - it seemed - some essence or distillation, and watched, her eyes glistening, as Alice tasted and said, "Yes, fantastic, wonderful."
"I am a great cook," sang or purred Caroline. "This is what I ought to be doing...." And, because she was reminded of what she was doing, how employed, a bleakness came over her for a moment, and she was silent.
She told Alice her history. A good daughter of the middle classes, as she described herself, she saw the light - that is, that the System was rotten and needed a radical overthrow - when she was eighteen. She was in love with a young Che Guevara from the LSE, but he turned respectable on her and settled for the Labour Party. Nevertheless, he was the love of her life. When she visited him - "Absolute anguish, my dear, why do I do it?" - she knew that this was the man for her. "But how could I live like that? I couldn't! One weekend is enough. Then we weep, we quarrel, and we part. Until next time." So she chattered, becoming flushed, seeming to loosen and soften from the heat in the kitchen, flour on her cheek, sleeves rolled up, her large white hands in control of everything. She looked plump, soft, content, full of secret and unscrupulous satisfactions.
Jasper and Bert came back, ready for hot baths and food. They had gone down to Nottingham to join the pickets in a miners' strike. It had rained and was cold. Roberta and Faye were starving, they said when they returned. Faye had colour in her cheeks again; she had rejoined the living, and was amusingly and enliveningly her cockney self. Roberta, so happy that her love was better, showed a side of herself they had not seen. She sang, very well, in a full, controlled contralto, first some workers' songs, then a whole range of songs from the Portuguese, from Spanish, from Russian. It turned out that she had been trained to sing, but she had found her niche with the revolution.
There was enough wine, and everyone got tight. Mary and Reggie did not appear.
They were all going up to bed, at about two in the morning, when there was a low, hurried knock at the front door.
"My God, the police," shrieked Alice and rushed to confront them. But it was not the police. Two young men shouldering large packages stood there, smiling, bent sideways from the weight.
"What's that? You can't bring those here," said Alice, knowing what was happening, all her pleasure in the evening gone, feeling chilled and apprehensive.
"Come on, now," said one, Irish as they make them. "We were told to leave these here."
"It's a mistake," said Alice.
But he had slid the package onto the hall floor and gone off, while his fellow, grinning bashfully, let his load slide off.
"You have to take them back," said Alice. "Do you understand?" They had both gone down the path, and she could see them standing by a small shabby van. They were conferring, turning to check the house number with a piece of paper. Alice arrived beside them and said, "You haven't understood. This stuff shouldn't be left here! You must take it away again."
"Ah, well now, but that's easily said," said the one who had spoken before. He sounded injured. More, afraid. He even glanced around into the shadowy gardens, and then out into the main road, where the traffic was thinner but still moving. It was a dark night, damp. The three stood close together under the street light and argued.
Alice said that this was the wrong house, and the house they wanted, number 45, was no longer safe to leave anything at.
They said that they had been told number 43.
"You have got to take them away."
"And we will not!"
She imagined that she heard a window going up behind her and turned to stare up into the darkened top of the house opposite Joan Robbins, and while she did this the two men took the opportunity to nip into the van. She had to stand aside quickly to avoid being run over.