Alice said quickly, her heart full of a familiar soft ache, on Jasper's account, "It doesn't go against my grain. I've done it often."

"Oh, you have, have you?" said Pat. "So have I. Where?"

"In Birmingham. A group of seven of us went to the Council over a scheduled house. We paid gas and electricity and water, and we stayed there thirteen months."

"Good for you."

"And in Halifax, I was in a negotiated squat for six months. And when I was in digs in Manchester - that was when I was at university - there was a house full of students, nearly twenty of us. It started off as a squat, the Council came to terms, and it ended up as a student house."

During this the two men listened, proceedings suspended. Jasper had again filled his mug. Bert indicated to Pat that the Thermos was empty, and she shook her head, listening to Alice.

"Why don't we go to the Council?" said Alice directly to Pat.

"I would. But I'm leaving anyway." Alice saw Bert's body stiffen, and he sat angry and silent.

Pat said to Bert, "I told you last night I was leaving."

Alice had understood that this was more than political. She saw that a personal relationship was breaking up because of some political thing! Every instinct repudiated this. She thought, involuntarily, What nonsense, letting politics upset a personal relationship! This was not really her belief: she would not have stood by it if challenged. But similar thoughts often did pass through her mind.

Pat said, to Bert's half-averted face, "What the fuck did you expect? At an ordinary meeting like that - two of them from outside, we didn't know anything about them. We don't know anything about the couple who came last week. Jim was in the room, and he isn't even CCU. Suddenly putting forward that resolution."

"It wasn't sudden."

"When we discussed it before, we decided to make individual approaches. To discuss it with individuals, carefully."

Her voice was full of contempt. She was looking at - presumably - her lover as though he was fit for the dustbin.

"You've changed your mind, at any rate," said Bert, his red lips shining angrily from his thickets of beard. "You agreed that to support the IRA was the logical position for this stage."

"It is the only correct attitude; Ireland is the fulcrum of the imperialist attack," said Jasper.

"I haven't changed my mind," said Pat. "But if I am going to work with the IRA or anyone else, then I'm going to know who I am working with."

"You don't know us," said Alice, with a pang of painful realisation: she and Jasper were part of the reason for this couple's breakup.

"No hard feelings," said Pat. "Nothing personal. But yes. The first I heard of you was when Bert said he had met Jasper at the CND rally Saturday. And I gather Bert hadn't even met you."

"No," said Alice.

"Well, I'm sorry, but that's not the way to do things."

"I see your point," said Alice.

A silence. The two young women stood at the window, in an aromatic cloud from Pat's cigarette. The two men were in chairs, in the centre of the room. The rainlike pattering of the drum came from Jim beyond the hall.

Alice said, "How many people are left here now?"

Pat did not answer, and at last Bert said, "With you two, seven." He added, "I don't know about you, Pat."

"Yes, you do," said Pat, sharp and cold. But they were looking at each other now, and Alice thought: No, it won't be easy for them to split up. She said, "Well, if it's seven, then four of us are here now. Five if Pat... Where are the other two? I want to get an agreement that I go to the Council."

"The lavatories full of cement. The electricity cables torn out. Pipes smashed," said Bert on a fine rising, derisive note.

"It's not difficult to put it right," said Alice. "We did it in Birmingham. The Council smashed the place to a ruin. They pulled the lavatories completely out there. All the pipes. Filled the bath with cement. Piled garbage in all the rooms. We got it clean."

"Who is going to pay for it?" That was Bert.

"We are."

"Out of what?"

"Oh, belt up," said Pat, "it costs us more in take-away and running around cadging baths and showers than it would to pay electricity and gas."

"It's a point," said Bert.

"And it would keep Old Bill off our backs," said Alice.

Silence. She knew that some people - and she suspected Bert, though not Pat, of this - would be sorry to hear it. They enjoyed encounters with the police.

Bert said unexpectedly, "Well, if we are going to build up our organisation, we aren't going to need attention from Old Bill."

"Right on," said Pat. "As I've been saying."

Silence again. Alice saw it was up to her. She said, "One problem. In this borough they need someone to guarantee the electricity and gas. Who is in work?"

"Three of the comrades who left last night were."

"Comrades!" said Bert. "Opportunistic shits."

"They are very good, honest communists," said Pat. "They happen not to want to work with the IRA."

Bert began to heave with silent theatrical laughter, and Jasper joined him.

"So we are all on Social Security," said Alice.

"So no point in going to the Council," said Bert.

Alice hesitated and said painfully, "I could ask my mother..."

At this Jasper exploded in raucous laughter and jeers, his face scarlet. "Her mother, bourgeois pigs..."

"Shut up," said Alice. "We were living with my mother for four years," she explained in a breathless, balanced voice, which seemed to her unkindly cold and hostile. "Four years. Bourgeois or not."

"Take the rich middle class for what you can get," said Jasper. "Get everything out of them you can. That's my line."

"Yes, yes," said Alice. "I agree. But she did keep us for four years." Then, capitulating, "Well, why shouldn't she? She is my mother." This last was said in a trembling, painful little voice.

"Right," said Pat, examining her curiously. "Well, no point in asking mine. Haven't seen her for years."

"Well, then," said Bert, suddenly getting up from the chair and standing in front of Pat, a challenge, his black eyes full on her. "So you're not leaving after all?"

"We've got to discuss it, Bert," she said, hurriedly, and walked over to him, and looked up into his face. He put his arm around her and they went out.

Alice surveyed the room. Skilfully. A family sitting room it had been. Comfortable. The paint was not too bad; the chairs and sofa probably stood where they had then. There was a fireplace, not even plastered over.

"Are you going to ask your mother? I mean, to be a guarantor?" Jasper sounded forlorn. "And who's going to pay for getting it all straight?"

"I'll ask the others if they'll contribute."

"And if they won't?" he said, knowingly, sharing expertise with her, a friendly moment.

"Some won't, we know that," she said, "but we'll manage. We always do, don't we?"

But this was too direct an appeal to intimacy. At once he backed away into criticism. "And who's going to do all the work?"

As he had been saying now for fourteen, fifteen years.

In the house in Manchester she had shared with four other students she had been housemother, doing the cooking and shopping, housekeeping. She loved it. She got an adequate degree, but did not even try for a job. She was still in the house when the next batch of students arrived, and she stayed to look after them. That was how Jasper found her, coming in one evening for supper. He was not a student, had graduated poorly, had failed to find a job after halfhearted efforts. He stayed on in the house, not formally living there but as Alice's "guest." After all, it was only because of Alice's efforts that the place had become a student house: it had been a squat. And Jasper did not leave. She knew he had become dependent on her. But then and since he had complained she was nothing but a servant, wasting her life on other people. As they moved from squat to squat, commune to commune, this pattern remained: she looked after him, and he complained that other people exploited her.