Side by side on the pavement, which was, because of the cement teeth, as narrow as it had been before the widening, Alice and Jocelin looked at the scene. A reversing or too narrowly turning lorry had knocked one of the teeth sideways. Their bases were stained with dog urine and shit. Under the low grey dawn sky, the still-sleeping houses held the people who would be insulted by these pavements, these cement teeth, every time they came out of doors. The houses seemed tender and innocent, the sky pure and sad. Then began the dawn chorus.
Alice was weeping with rage.
Jocelin sighed, and said, "Right. I see what you mean. But this isn't an easy location. There must be people around most times of the day and night."
"There are none now."
"But there are always night owls looking out of windows, or women up with their babies."
Alice was comforted by this evidence of the ordinary in Jocelin, but said, "But that is true of everywhere, all the time, isn't it?"
Jocelin did not answer. She was looking at the knocked-askew tooth. Without guiltily glancing around, or looking along the rows of windows, she went quickly to this stanchion and tried to lift it. It moved a little. Alice joined her, and together, with difficulty, they raised it to the perpendicular and let it go again.
Swiftly, Jocelin examined the gap at the base of this tooth, where there were some thin metal wires, and said, "This will do. I'll put the charge under it. Then make it stand upright. All I want to know is how much I need to use of something. Tomorrow. We'll do it tomorrow. About an hour earlier than this."
It was getting on for five.
They had been standing there for a good ten minutes, but not a soul had appeared. Yet they were surrounded by windows and, possibly, eyes. A familiar feeling of recklessness, excitement, was stealing through Alice. Her awful lethargy had gone. The dim, grey numb feeling like a poison - gone!
And as they turned the corner to their street, she broke into a run, and sprinted, from sheer excess energy, up to their gate, and vaulted over it, and then up the path, to be brought to a halt by the door, which after all had to be opened. With a key.
Jocelin, arriving calmly, said, "One has to be very together for this job. Calm. Not excitable." Alice muttered something apologetic.
They went up to bed.
Alice did not sleep much; she was thrilling with excitement, with anticipation. Coming downstairs in a sleeping house, she made herself walk sedately, because of what Jocelin had said.
She sat in the kitchen and thought, Well, here I am again, waiting for people to wake up. She drank tea, ate wholemeal toast and honey, then remembered the packages in the attic. At once her whole self seemed afflicted with confusion, with division. What was needed was a car... but there was no car at 45.... How to get hold of a car? Checking that it wasn't too late - about eight, time to get her before she went to work - Alice walked as fast as she could to Felicity's place.
Felicity was just coming out of the gate, and when she saw Alice, wary annoyance possessed her. But Alice gave her no time to develop this. She went straight up and said, "Philip's affairs are more or less sorted out. But they are looking for his sister. If they don't find her in a couple of days, they'll fix the funeral for Monday or Tuesday anyway." Felicity, as expected and as she ought, looked embarrassed, if impatient, and said, "Thanks, it's good of you to take it on."
"I had no alternative," Alice reminded her crisply.
The two women stood facing each other, but Felicity looked as though she were in a game of trying to dodge past someone without being touched. Alice said, "Can I borrow your car for a few hours?"
At this Felicity sighed and said, "But I'm using it this morning." Felicity was a social worker.
"I need it," said Alice simply.
Felicity thought, and said, "You could have it tomorrow morning until lunchtime." She could not have said more clearly: And that is all you are getting from me as quid pro quo! Alice answered this with, "Fine. We'll consider accounts settled, then." Hearing it put into words made Felicity blush, but she said, "I'm in a hurry. Same time tomorrow?" And almost ran to her car, a Datsun, which stood parked with all the other conforming, obedient cars along the pavement's edge.
That's done, thought Alice, and put all thoughts of the dangerous packages out of her head. Tomorrow she would take them to the municipal rubbish tip, and that would be that. And if any more turned up, they would be got rid of.
Outside her front door stood a man, in a neat grey suit and a tie, so much the official that she thought, Oh no, not the Council again, and put on her competent, I-am-coping-with-everything face.
But it was in an American accent that he said, or stated, "Alice Mellings?"
"That's right" - and she knew that this forthcoming encounter was one she would need all her wits for. Her excited blood told her so.
"Can I come in?"
Without speaking, she opened the door, and went in front of him to the kitchen, and indicated that he should sit in the chair at the end of the table. She put on the kettle and sat at the head.
He looked younger than herself. But he was the type to look young. He had a smooth face, attentive and polite, like an old-fashioned student. He had rather nice brown eyes, at the moment devoted to her every movement, eyes that examined her as closely as she did him. He had well-cared-for hands. But his most remarkable feature was his featurelessness. There was nothing, but nothing, to fasten on to in him. A clerk; someone essentially indoor, weathered at the worst by a draught or too-cold air from a left-open window. He might have taken an exam in how to be ordinary! Yet there was something excessive in it.... Of course, she, Alice, was only likely to meet nonconformists - or, as her mother in her old-fashioned way put it, bohemians; and, of course, in England in these days, particularly London, no one gave a fuck, but all the same...
It was he who broke the silence with, "Comrade Mellings, I was informed early this morning that you were reluctant to accept a consignment of materiel."
Alice stared. The use of the word materiel now, in this context, was not thrilling her at all. In this situation (one she wanted to shake off and be rid of), the word materiel was too portentous; it was a word that insisted on being taken seriously.
He said, "Is that true, Comrade Mellings? I would like some kind of explanation." He spoke as it were abstractly, his own personality removed, but the words he used were enough, and she was suddenly furious. Who the fuck did he think...