"She's in shock," said Alice.
"Then get her into the ambulance," said the policeman, turning away to join with others in pushing away onlookers.
There was nothing for it. Alice went with Roberta in the ambulance, together with ten others, all of them shocked or slightly hurt. The badly wounded were being loaded into other ambulances.
Theirs was one of the first away. Alice and Roberta were silent, listening to people who wept, who complained, or who excitedly told their stories; how they were peacefully going along the street, or in or out of the hotel, and then...
Cut faces and arms, possible fractures, bruises. One woman had had her clothes torn off her by the blast and was wrapped in a blanket. Another had been flung right through the window that at that moment had been in the process of shattering. She was covered with small deep cuts and seemed the worst off.
They were in the hospital in a few minutes.
Roberta was examined and pronounced unharmed.
Alice explained to a sympathetic policeman that Roberta and she had been going into the hotel when it happened. They got into a taxi and were driven home. The taxi man said it was a shocking thing; probably those Arabs again; they had no sense of the sacred-ness of life, not like the Westerners; if he had his way he would stop the Arabs from coming here.
Roberta and Alice said nothing.
It was seven when they reached home. In the kitchen was Bert, attending to Jasper, who had a great many cuts on his face and his head, but was otherwise all right. Bert said he should get the cuts stitched up; some of them were deep. Jasper said no. And Jasper was right. He should have stayed, instead of running away, Jocelin argued, and then he could have told some story and got himself stitched up with the others in hospital. Now, he must on no account go near a hospital, or even a doctor. But one of the women in the squat in South London had been a nurse; it would be all right to go down there.
"I don't think it would be all right," said Jasper. "The fewer people involved, the better."
Alice thought this was sensible, and tried to examine the cuts. He shook her off. They didn't seem too bad to her; perhaps they wouldn't leave scars. Well, there was always plastic surgery.
The five of them finally sat round the table.
Jasper told them, in a businesslike, formal way, how, as he had turned the car out of the street where it had been left, he had misjudged a distance and scraped the front mudguard of a parked car. He would have driven off, but now there was a car immediately blocking his way, and a man who had seen the incident from a first-floor window came running out to say that Jasper need not think he was just going to escape and get away with it. Jasper had said that no such thought had been in his mind. The man said he was lying. They had had quite a little shouting match before they reached the point of exchanging insurance companies: Jasper, of course, had had to say he would supply the address of his later. Then it turned out that the dented mudguard was pressing on the back wheel, and they had to get out of the car and use a heavy spanner to hit the mudguard until it was free of the wheel. The man from the house was standing over them, as if they were criminals who had to be watched. To reach the dent in the mudguard, Jasper had to lie full-length in the road, and hit it from below, and at an angle. It was awkward and took time, and they were holding up the traffic.
When they at last got into the stream of traffic again, they were so late they thought of calling the whole thing off. Faye could easily disconnect the bombs, but the trouble was that this time the work would be in full view of all the people in the cars and the passers-by on the pavement. Besides, said Faye, do or die; she was game. A pity to have gone to all this trouble and give up.
When Faye had turned, the second time, not immediately up past the hotel but on the next turning, it was because they had not seen any parking places, had decided to stop the car anywhere they could find a place so that, regardless of who was watching, Faye could wrench the connections off the bombs. They then had only twelve minutes to go. But there were no parking places anywhere along that street.
"No," Faye had said gallantly, "there's nothing for it," and had tried to drive faster, but was hemmed in by traffic.
And when Jasper had got out but Faye had not, was it that Faye's door had jammed? Had he been going to help her with the door?
This was Roberta, and she sounded accusing.
Jasper hesitated. Alice knew it was because he was trying to think how not to say something. When he looked like this, very pale but luminous, with a candid, suffering, helpless look, it meant he was going to lie. Or wanted to. He began to stutter, checked himself, and said simply, "When Faye drove into the empty space, she went too fast up onto the pavement, and then braked. She did not have on her seat belt. We did not have our seat belts on, you see."
"Of course not," said Roberta, severely.
"But she was jerked forward, and the driving wheel got the pit of her stomach. She didn't have any breath, you see?" he said gently to Roberta. Alice was thinking, There, he's kind, Jasper's kind, he didn't want to tell Roberta any of this....
Roberta was staring at Jasper, her mouth was open, and she was breathing badly. She was thinking, they all knew, that her Faye had been killed because of some silly little thing, something ridiculous; for the rest of her life Roberta would be thinking, incredulous, that Faye died because she drove too fast and too hard up onto a pavement.
"I could see she couldn't move," said Jasper. "I got the car into reverse - I stretched my feet over, and did it. Then I said she must get out quickly. But she did not move. I think she was too sick to move. I got out to drag her out of the car from the driving side. And then the bomb went off."
"Five minutes too early," said Roberta, this time accusing Jocelin. Who, like Jasper, had sat quiet, hesitating. There was something she did not want to say.
Roberta asked quickly, "Who set the timing? Faye?"
"Yes."
Roberta shook her head, as if saying No, no, no - to all of it - but then sat heavily silent, saying yes to tea, yes to sugar in it, yes to a biscuit. But she did not eat, or drink.
Roberta, they all knew, would at some point come out of this passive state.
Jasper was beginning to hurt, very badly. Bert ran upstairs, fetched painkillers for Jasper, sedatives for Roberta, and a radio.
They listened to the news.
"Five people have been killed, and twenty-three injured, some seriously, this afternoon, when a car exploded outside the Kubla Khan hotel, breaking all the windows down that side and damaging several parked cars. This monstrous and callous crime illustrated yet again the total lack of ordinary feeling by the IRA, who had claimed responsibility for the crime."
"Well, what about that," said Jocelin. "What a fucking nerve."
"Absolutely," said Alice, not connecting her telephone call with this development. Then, after a few minutes, listening to the indignation, the frustration of the others, she did connect it, and she realised that she could never tell them what she had done. Never. She never would be trusted again.
Suppose Bert remembered that she had been gone off that pavement near to him for what must have been a good five minutes?
It seemed he did not.
At about ten o'clock Caroline came back. She was distant, even cold. She said she wouldn't sit down; she was tired and wanted to sleep.
She had heard the news, she said, when it seemed that Jasper was about to start the story.
She made herself coffee, drank it standing, not looking at them.
"Where's Faye?" she asked, and they realised there was no possible way she could know.