LITMIR.BIZ

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room was a veritable bower of femininity, with dressing-table, cushions, duvet on the double sleeping-bag, photographs – a bit grubby, but it would make a good impression. She whisked on a skirt. Her hair, her nails. She heard a knock before she expected it and tripped down the stairs with a cool smile already adjusted on her face to open the door correctly on, ‘Bob Hood? I am Alice Mellings.’

      ‘I hope those two on the roof know what they are doing?’

      ‘I expect so. He is a builder. She is assisting him. As an amateur, but she has done it before.’

      She had silenced him. Oh you nasty little man, she was thinking behind her good girl’s smile. You nasty little bureaucrat.

      ‘Shall I show you downstairs first? Of course this will give you no idea of what it was like only three days ago. For one thing, the Council workmen had filled in the lavatory bowls with concrete and ripped the electric cables out – they left them anyhow, a fire hazard.’

      He said, ‘I have no doubt they were fulfilling their instructions.’

      ‘You mean, they were instructed to leave the cables dangerous, and to concrete over the main water tap? I wonder if the Water Board knows about that?’

      He was red, and furious. Not looking at him, she flung open one door after another downstairs, lingering over the kitchen. ‘The electrician has made it safe in here, but you were lucky the place didn’t go up in flames. Mary Williams said you had been over this house. How was it you didn’t notice the cables?’

      Upstairs, she said, knowing that to this man anything incorrect, even so much as a mattress on a floor rather than on a bed, must for ever be an affront, ‘Of course you will have to take my word for it – the state of these rooms was unspeakably awful when we came, but we have only just started.’

      ‘Unspeakably awful now,’ he said huffily, looking in at the room she and Jasper slept in, the two sleeping-bags like the shed skins of snakes loose against the wall.

      ‘It’s relative. I think you will be surprised when you see it in a month’s time.’

      He said, quick to take his advantage, ‘I told you, don’t expect anything.’

      ‘If this house is left empty again, it will be filled to the brim with vandals and derelicts inside a week, you know that. You’re lucky to have us. It’s being put back into order, with no expense to the ratepayer.’

      He did not reply to that. In silence they went through the rooms on the top floor, now sweet-smelling, the air blowing through them. He instinctively closed the windows one after another, performing the task with a fussy, virtuous, irritated little air. Like a fucking housewife, thought the smiling Alice.

      They went downstairs. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have to agree with you – there’s no reason why these houses should come down, that I can see. I’ll have to look into it.’

      ‘Unless,’ said Alice, sweet and cold, ‘someone was going to make a profit out of it. Did you see the article in the Guardian? The Scandal of Council Housing?’

      ‘As it happens, I did. But it is not relevant to this case.’

      ‘I see.’

      They were at the door.

      She was waiting. She deserved a capitulation; and it came. The official said, unsmiling but with his whole body expressing unwilling complicity. ‘I’ll put the case for you tomorrow. But I am not promising. And it is not just this house, it’s No. 45. I’m going there now.’

      Again Alice had forgotten next door.

      Bob Hood gone, she ran up to a little window that overlooked next door, and watched, in a rage of frustration, how the well-brushed, well-dressed clean young man stood looking at the piles of rubbish in that garden, saw that the expression on his face was like that on the dustmen’s faces: an exasperated, incredulous disgust.

      Unable to bear the beating of her heart, her churning stomach, she went down, slowly, suddenly out of energy, and collapsed in the sitting-room as Pat came in, with Philip.

      ‘Well?’ demanded Pat; and Philip’s face was stunned with need, with longing, his eyes a prayer.

      ‘It’s dicey,’ said Alice, and began to weep, to her own fury.

      ‘Oh God,’ she wept. ‘Oh Christ. Oh shit. Oh no.’

      Pat, close on the arm of the chair she was huddled in, put her arm around the dejected shoulders and said, ‘You’re tired. Surprise! – you are tired.’

      ‘It’ll be all right,’ sobbed Alice. ‘I know it will be, it will, I feel it.’

      From the silence, she knew that above her head Philip and Pat shared glances that said she, Alice, had to be humoured, patted, caressed, given coffee from the flask, then brandy from a reserve bottle. But she knew that while Pat’s interest was real, it was not like Philip’s and like her own. Pat’s heart would never beat, nor her stomach churn…For this reason, she did not accept Pat’s encircling sisterliness, remained herself, alone, sad and isolated, drinking her coffee, her brandy. Philip was her charge, her responsibility: her family, so she felt, because he was as she was. She was pleased, though, to have Pat as an ally.

      And at this point, Jasper and Bert arrived with gleanings from London, that great lucky dip, and Alice flew into the hall, to welcome a load of stuff, which had to be sorted out; and which switched her emotions back to another circuit. ‘Oh the wicked waste of it all,’ she raged, seeing plastic bags full of curtains, which were there because someone had tired of them; a refrigerator, stools, tables, chairs – all of them serviceable, if some needed a few minutes’ work to put right.

      Bert and Jasper went out again; they were elated and enjoying it. A pair, a real pair, a team; united by this enterprise of theirs, furnishing this house. And they had the car for the whole day, and must make the most of it.

      Philip and Pat left the roof, while they helped Alice allot furniture, flew out to buy curtain fittings for which Alice found the money from her hoard.

      They ran around, and up and down, dragging furniture, hanging curtains, spreading on the hall floor a large carpet that needed only some cleaning to make it perfect.

      Bert and Jasper came back in the late afternoon, having scavenged around Mayfair and St John’s Wood, with another load, and said that was it, no more for today – and the householders sat in the kitchen drinking tea and eating bacon and eggs properly cooked on the stove, with the purr of the refrigerator for company.

      And in the middle of this feast, which was such a delicate balancing of interests, the result of careful and calculated goodwill, there was a knock. It was, however, tentative, not a peremptory summons. They turned as one; from the kitchen they could see the front door, and it was opening. A young woman stood there and, as the others stared: whose friend is she? Alice’s heart began to pound. She already knew it all, from the way this visitor was looking around the hall, which was carpeted, warm, properly if dimly lit, then up the solid stairs, and then in at them all. She was all hungry determination and purpose.

      ‘The Council,’ reassured Alice. ‘It’s Mary Williams. The colleague of that little fascist who was here today. But she’s all right…’ This last she knew was really the beginning of an argument that would be taking place later, perhaps even that night. Perhaps not an argument, not bitterness, but only a friendly discussion – oh, prayed Alice, let it be all right, and she slipped away from the others, saying, ‘It’s all right, I’ll just…’

      She shut the door on the kitchen, and on a laugh which said she was bossy, but not impossibly so. Oh please, please, please, she was inwardly entreating – Fate, perhaps – as she went smiling towards Mary. Who was smiling in entreaty at Alice.

      As Alice had absolutely expected, Mary began, ‘I dropped in at the office – I was on a course today, you know, they send you on courses, I’m doing Social Relationships – and I saw Bob on his way out. He told me he had been here…’

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