Puffball
Fay Weldon

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

In the Beginning

Inside Liffey (I)

Holding Back

Inside Liffey (2)

Mothers

Inside Liffey (3)

In-Laws and Secretaries

Christmas Pledges

Friends

Realities

Farmyards

In Residence

In Richard’s Life

Liffey Without Richard

Richard Without Liffey

The Underside of Things

Full Moon

Good and Bad

Solitude

Inside Liffey (4)

Ins and Outs

Inside Liffey (5)

Conception

Inside Liffey (6)

Inside Richard’s Office

Justifications

Nature

Inside Liffey (7)

Marvels

Suppositions

Annunciation

Growth

Danger

Resolutions

Investigations

Alterations

Inside Mabs (I)

Inside Liffey (8)

Upsets

Sixteen Weeks

Trouble

Visitors

Movement

Inside Liffey (9)

In the City, in the Summer

Complications

In-Laws

Inside and Outside

Events

Waiting

Preparations

Catharsis

Inside Liffey (10)

Guests

The Unexpected

Labour

Missions of Mercy

Birth

Repair

Murder

Resignation

Ripples

Good Fortune

Conclusion

Fay Weldon

Also by Fay Weldon

Copyright

About the Publisher

In the Beginning

Many people dream of country cottages. Liffey dreamed for many years, and saw the dream come true one hot Sunday afternoon, in Somerset, in September. Bees droned, sky glazed, flowers glowed, and the name carved above the lintel, half-hidden by rich red roses, was Honeycomb Cottage and Liffey knew that she must have it. A trap closed round her.

The getting of the country cottage, not the wanting—that was the trap. It was a snare baited by Liffey’s submerged desires and unrealised passions, triggered by nostalgia for lost happiness, and set off by fear of a changing future. But how was Liffey, who believed that she was perfectly happy and perfectly ordinary, to know a thing like that? Liffey saw smooth green lawns where others saw long tangled grass, and was not looking out for snares.

Besides, as Liffey’s mother Madge once observed, ‘Liffey wants what she wants and gets cross with those who stand in her way.’

Richard stood in Liffey’s way that hot September afternoon, and Liffey was cross with him. Richard had been married to Liffey for seven years, and responded, as spouses will, to the message behind the words, and not the words themselves.

‘I want to live in the country,’ said Liffey, remarkably enough, for she did not often put her wants and wishes so straightforwardly into words.

‘We can’t,’ said Richard, ‘because I have to earn a living,’ and it was unlike him to disappoint her so directly, and so brutally.

Liffey and Richard seldom had rows, and were nearly always polite to each other, which made them believe they were ideally suited and happily married. She was small and bright and pretty; and he was large, handsome and responsible. She was twenty-eight, and he thirty-two. Madge was relieved that Liffey was, so far, childless; but Richard’s mother, although an Anglican, had already lit a candle to the Virgin Mary and prayed for the grandchild she could reasonably have expected five years ago. They had been married for seven years, after all.

‘But we could be so happy here,’ said Liffey. The cottage stood on rising ground, at a point where smooth fields met wooded hillside. It looked across the plains to Glastonbury Tor, that hummocky hill which rises out of the flat Somerset levels, and is a nexus of spiritual power, attracting UFOs, and tourists, and pop festivals, and hippies, and the drug squad. The cottage was empty. Spiderwebs clouded the latticed windows.

‘We are happy where we are,’ said Richard. Adding, ‘Aren’t we?’ in a half threatening, half pleading tone of voice, so she was obliged to forget his crossness and kiss him, and say yes. And indeed, their city apartment was small, but convenient and comfortable, and Liffey had never before complained about it, nor had any real reason to. If she gave voice to worries they were not so much personal as ecological, and were about the way the earth’s natural resources were being eaten up, and what was happening to the blue whale, and baby seals, and butterflies, and what deforestation did to the ozone layer above Brazil. Richard, who knew that new developments in nuclear, chemical and silicon chip technology would soon solve all such problems, laughed gently and comfortingly at her worries and loved her for worrying. He liked to look after her, or thought he did.

After they kissed, he took Liffey round to the back of the cottage, through hollyhocks and wallflowers, and there, in the long grasses down by the stream, made love to her. It was a decorous event, characteristic of their particular mating behaviour. Liffey lay still and quiet, and Richard was quick and dutiful.

‘Isn’t she skinny,’ said Mabs, watching through field glasses from the bedroom of Cadbury Farm. Her husband Tucker took the glasses.

‘They grow them like that in the city,’ he said. They both spoke in the gentle, caressing drawl of the West Country, mocking the universe, defying its harshness. ‘You don’t know they’re from the city,’ Mabs objected. ‘They’re not from round here,’ said Tucker. ‘No one round here does it in public.’

Cadbury Farm was made of stone, and so long and low and old it all but vanished into the fold of the hill above the cottage. Liffey and Richard, certainly, had not noticed it was there. Tucker’s family had lived at Cadbury Farm, or on its site, for a thousand years or so. When Tucker moved about his fields, he seemed so much part of them he could hardly be seen. Mabs was more noticeable. She was reckoned a foreigner: she came from Crossley, five miles away. She was a large, slow, powerful woman and Tucker was a small, lithe man. So had her Norman ancestors been, ousting the small dark Celts, from which Tucker took his colouring and nature.

‘Richard,’ said Liffey, ‘you don’t think we can be seen?’ ‘Of course not,’ said Richard. ‘Why are you always so guilty? ‘There’s nothing wrong with sex. Everyone does it.’ ‘My mother didn’t,’ said Liffey, contradicting because the feeling of crossness had returned. Sexual activity can sweep away many resentments and anxieties, but not those which are bred of obsession and compulsion. ‘Or only when she had me,’ she amended.

‘More fool her,’ said Richard, who didn’t want to talk about Liffey’s mother. Richard’s parents had described Liffey’s mother, after the wedding, as wonderfully clever and eccentric, and Richard had watched Liffey carefully since, in case she seemed to be going the same way.

‘If we lived in the country,’ persisted Liffey, ‘and had a bit of peace and quiet, I could really get down to writing my novel.’ Liffey had secretarial training and did temporary work in offices from time to time, when it didn’t interfere with her looking after Richard, but felt that such work could hardly, as she put it, fulfil her. So she wrote, in her spare time, poems and paragraphs, and ideas, and even short stories. She showed what she wrote to nobody, not even to Richard, but felt a certain sense of progress and achievement for having done it.

‘You’d be bored to death,’ said Richard, meaning that he feared that he would.

‘You have your career and your fulfilment,’ persisted Liffey, ‘and what do I have? Why should your wishes be more important than mine?’

Why indeed? Richard could not even cite his money earning capacity in his defence, since Liffey had a small fortune of her own, left to her by a grandfather. And he had of late become very conscious of the communal guilt which the male sex appears to bear in relation to women. All the same, Liffey’s words rang fashionable and hollow in the silence he allowed to follow them.

He made love to her again. Moral confusion excited him sexually—or at any rate presented itself as a way out of difficulty, giving him time to think, and a generally agreeable time at that.

‘She’s just a farmyard animal like any other,’ said Tucker handing over the glasses to Mabs.

‘Women aren’t animals,’ said Mabs.

‘Yes, they are,’ said Tucker, ‘tamed for the convenience of men.’

Mabs put down her glasses and looked malevolently at her husband, frightening him into silence. Then she turned back to Liffey and Richard and watched some more.

‘They’re very quick about it,’ she complained to Tucker.

‘I thought city folks got up to all kinds of tricks. Do you fancy her?’

‘She’s too skinny for my taste,’ said Tucker.

‘And you can do a lot better than him,’ said Mabs, returning the compliment.

‘I should hope so,’ said Tucker, and did, pushing Mabs’ old grey skirt up and reaching the oyster-coloured silk underwear beneath. She was fussy about what she wore next to her skin. She had surprisingly long and slender legs. Her bulk was contained in her middle parts. Tucker loved the way her sharp brown eyes, in the act of love, turned soft and docile, large irised, like those of his cows. The image of Liffey stayed in his mind, as Mabs had intended it should, and helped. Mabs made good use of everything that came her way, and Tucker did, too.

‘If you would have a baby,’ said Richard to Liffey, as they lay in the long grass, the late sun striking low across the land, ‘there’d be some point in living in the country.’ Liffey did not want a baby, or at any rate not now. She might be chronologically twenty-eight, but felt eighteen, and eighteen was too young to have a baby.

Liffey looked at Honeycomb Cottage. Generations of happy, healthy children, she thought, had skipped in and out of the door, along the path, under roses and between hollyhocks. There, loving couples had grown old in peace and tranquillity, at one with the rhythms of nature. Here she and Richard would be safe, out of the city which already had turned a few of his dark hairs grey, and was turning his interest away from her, and which threatened her daily with its pollutants and violence; the city: where there was a rapist round every corner, and rudeness at every turn, and an artificiality of life and manners which sickened her.

‘All right,’ said Liffey, ‘let’s have a baby.’

Panic rose in her throat, even as she spoke.

‘All right,’ said Richard, ‘let’s live in the country.’

He regretted it at once.

Mabs was in the yard of Cadbury Farm as Richard and Liffey drove back towards the main road along the bumpy track that passed both cottage and farm. Richard had to stop the car while Tucker drove his cows in. Mangy dogs strained and barked at the end of chains, and were yelled into silence by Mabs. She bent to give them bones and her rump was broad.

‘So long as you don’t ever let yourself go,’ added Richard, and then Mabs stood straight and smiled full at Richard and Liffey. She was formless and shapeless in her old grey skirt and her husband’s shirt. Her hair was ratty, she had unplucked whiskers on her double chin, and she weighed all of thirteen stone. But she was tall and strong and powerful, and her skin was creamy white.

‘She looks like a horse,’ said Liffey. ‘Do you ever see me looking like a horse?’

‘You’d better not,’ said Richard, ‘or we’ll move straight back to town.’

Richard did not believe that Liffey, if offered the country, would actually want to live there. He believed he had called her bluff—which had begun to irritate him—and brought her a little nearer to having a baby, and that was all. He was realistic where Liffey was romantic, and trained, as business executives ought to be, in the arts of manipulation.

‘Mind you,’ said Liffey, ‘horses are very friendly. There are worse things to be.’

Liffey, as horse, came from the Viennese stables. She tossed her head and neighed and pranced, precisely and correctly. She was trained in the arts of child-wifedom. Mabs, as horse, was a working dray—Tucker mounted her easily. She galloped and galloped and sweated and brayed, and what price breeding then? Who needed it? But how was Liffey to know a thing like that? Liffey never sweated, never brayed. Liffey made a sweet little mewling sound, as soon as she possibly could yet still carried conviction; a dear and familiar sound to Richard, for what their lovemaking might lack in quality was certainly made up for in frequency. Liffey felt that the act of copulation was a strange way to demonstrate the act of love, but did her best with it.

Tucker’s cows moved on. Richard and Liffey left.

‘They’ll be back,’ said Mabs to Tucker. He believed her. She seemed to have a hot line to the future, and he wished she did not. She had a reputation of being a witch, and Tucker feared it might be justified.

‘We don’t want city folk down Honeycomb,’ protested Tucker.

‘They might be useful,’ said Mabs, vaguely. Glastonbury Tor was dark and rose sharply out of a reddish, fading sky. She smiled at the hill as if it were a friend, and made Tucker still more uneasy.

Inside Liffey (I)

There was an outer Liffey, arrived at twenty-eight with boyish body and tiny breasts, with a love of bright, striped football sweaters and tight jeans, and a determination to be positive and happy. Outer Liffey, with her fluttery smiley eyes, sweet curvy face, dark curly hair, and white smooth skin. And there was inner Liffey, cosmic Liffey, hormones buzzing; heart beating, blood surging, pawn in nature’s game.

She put on scent, thrust out her chest, silhouetted her buttocks and drew male eyes to her. That way satisfaction lay: the easing of a blind and restless procreative spirit. How could she help herself? Why should she? It was her rôle in the mating dance, and Liffey danced on, as others do, long after the music stopped.

Liffey had lately been cross with Richard. Bad-tempered, so he’d ask if her period was due, thus making her more irritable still. Who wants to believe that their vision of the world is conditioned by their hormonal state: that no one else is truly at fault, except that believing it makes them so?

‘I’ve just had my period,’ she’d say, ‘as you surely ought to know,’ and make him feel the unfairness of it all, that he should be spared the pain and inconvenience of a monthly menstrual flow, and she should not.

‘Perhaps it’s the pill,’ he’d say.

‘I expect it’s just me,’ she’d say, bitterly.

But how was one to be distinguished from the other? For Liffey’s body was not functioning, as her doctor remarked, as nature intended. Not that ‘nature’ can reasonably be personified in this way—for what is nature, after all, for living creatures, but the sum of the chance genetic events which have led us down one evolutionary path or another. And although what seem to be its intentions may, in a bungled and muddled way, work well enough to keep this species or that propagating, they cannot be said always to be desirable for the individual.

But for good or bad—i.e. convenient for her, inconvenient for the race—Liffey had interfered with her genetic destiny and was on the pill. She took one tablet a day, of factory-made oestrogen and progesterone powders mixed. As a result, Liffey’s ovarian follicles failed to ripen and develop their egg. She could not, for this reason, become pregnant. But her baffled body responded by retaining fluid in its cells, and this made her from time to time more lethargic, irritable and depressed than otherwise would have been the case. Her toes and fingers were puffy. Her wedding ring would not come off, and her shoes hurt. And although the extra secretions from her cervix, responding to the oestrogen, helped preserve her uterus and cervix from cancer, they also predisposed her to thrush infections and inconveniently damped her pants. Her liver functioned differently to cope with the extraneous hormones, but not inefficiently. Her carbohydrate metabolism was altered and her heart was slightly affected, but was strong and young enough to beat steadily and sturdily on.

The veins in her white, smooth legs swelled slightly, but they too were young and strong and did not become varicose. The clotting mechanism of her blood altered, predisposing her to thrombo-embolic disease. But Liffey, which was the main thing, would not become pregnant. Liffey valued her freedom and her figure, and when older friends warned her that marriage must grow out of its early love affair and into bricks and mortar and children, she dismissed their vision of the world as gloomy.

Was Liffey’s resentment of Richard a matter of pressure in her brain caused by undue retention of fluid, or in fact the result of his behaviour? Liffey naturally assumed it was the latter. It is not pleasant for a young woman to believe that her behaviour is dictated by her chemistry, and that her wrongs lie in herself, and not in others’ bad behaviour.

Holding Back

The next weekend Liffey and Richard took their friends Bella and Ray down to visit Honeycomb Cottage.

The trap closed tighter.

‘When I say country,’ said Richard, to everyone, ‘I mean twenty miles outside London at the most. Somerset is impossible. But as a country cottage, it’s a humdinger.’ He had a slightly old-fashioned vocabulary.

Richard was, Bella always felt, a slightly old-fashioned young man. She wanted to loosen him up. She felt there was a wickedness beneath the veneer of well-bred niceness and that it was Liffey’s fault it remained so firmly battened down.

‘When I say have a baby,’ said Liffey, ‘I mean soon, very soon. Not quite now.’

Ray had a theory that wives always made themselves a degree less interesting than their husbands, and that Liffey, if married to, say, himself, would improve remarkably.

Bella and Ray were in their early forties and their friendship with Richard and Liffey was a matter of some speculation to Bella and Ray’s other friends. Perhaps Bella was after Richard, or Ray after Liffey? Perhaps they aimed for foursomes? Or perhaps, the most common consensus, Bella and Ray were just so dreadful they had to find their friends where best they could, and choice did not enter into it.

Bella and Ray—who wrote cookery columns and cookery books—were a couple other couples loved to hate. Liffey and Richard, however, such was their youth and simplicity, accepted Ray and Bella as they were: liked, admired and trusted them, and were flattered by their attention.

Ray and Bella had two children. Bella had waited until her mid-thirties to have them, by which time her fame and fortune were secure.

When Bella and Ray saw the cottage they knew at once it was not for them to admire or linger by. Its sweetness embarrassed them. Their taste ran to starker places: they would feel ridiculous under a thatch, with roses round their door. They rather unceremoniously left Richard and Liffey at the gate and borrowed the car and went off to the ruins of Glastonbury to inspect the monks’ kitchen with a view to a Special on medieval cookery.

‘Richard,’ said Liffey. ‘The main line station’s only ten minutes by car, and there’s a fast early train at seven in the morning which gets you in to London by half-past eight and a fast one back at night so you’d be home by half-past seven, and that’s only half an hour later than you get home now.’

The Tor was distant today, swathed in mists, so that it rose as if from a white sea. And indeed, the surrounding plains, the levels, had once been marsh and sea until drained by monks to provide pasture.

‘I want to live here, Richard,’ said Liffey. ‘If we live here I’ll come off the pill.’ Richard nodded.

He opened Liffey’s handbag and took out her little packet of contraceptive pills.

‘I don’t understand why someone who likes things to be natural,’ he said, ‘could ever rely on anything so unnatural as these.’

Richard took Liffey round to the field at the back and threw her pills, with some ceremony, into the stream, which recent rain had made to flow fast and free.

‘I wonder what he’s throwing away,’ said Mabs watching through the glasses.

‘So long as it’s nothing as will harm the cows,’ said

Tucker. ‘They drink that water.’

‘Told you they’d be back,’ said Mabs.

And Mabs and Tucker had a discussion as to whether it was in their best interests to have Richard and Liffey renting the cottage, and decided that it was, so long as they rented, and didn’t buy. An outright purchaser would soon discover that the two-acre field, on the far side of the stream, belonged to the cottage, and not, as Tucker pretended, to Cadbury Farm. Tucker found it convenient to graze his cows there; but would not find it convenient to pay for grazing rights. ‘You tell your sister to tell Dick Hubbard to keep his mouth shut about the stream field,’ said Tucker.

Dick Hubbard was the estate agent responsible for Honeycomb Cottage, with whom Mabs’ sister Carol was having an affair. Dick Hubbard was not married, but Carol was. Mabs disapproved of the relationship, and did not like Tucker mentioning it. Many things, these days, Mabs did not like. She did not like being forty any more than the next woman did; she was beginning to fear, for one reason and another, that she was infertile. She was, in general, suffering from a feeling she could only describe as upset—a wavering of purpose from day to day. And she did not like it.

‘He’ll keep it shut of his own accord,’ said Mabs.

Something about Liffey upset her even more: the arrogant turn of her head as she sat in the car waiting for Tucker’s cows to pass; the slight condescension in the smile; the way she leaned against Richard as if she owned him; the way she coupled with him, as she was doing now, in the open air, like an animal. Mabs felt that Liffey had everything too easy. Mabs felt that, rightly, Liffey had nothing to do in the world but enjoy herself, and that Liffey should be taken down a peg or two.

‘Nice to have a new neighbour,’ said Mabs, comfortingly, and Tucker looked at her suspiciously.

‘I wouldn’t fancy it down in the grass,’ said Mabs. ‘That stream’s downright unhealthy, and nasty things grow there at this time of year.’

‘You won’t mind when I swell up like a balloon?’ Liffey was saying to Richard.

‘I’ll love you all the more,’ said Richard. ‘I think pregnant women are beautiful. Soft and rounded and female.’ She lay on his chest, her bare breasts cool to his skin. He felt her limbs stiffen and grow tense before she cried out, her voice sharp with horror.

‘Look! What are they? Richard!’

Giant puffballs had pushed up out of the ground a yard or so from where they lay. How could she not have noticed them before? Three white globes, giant mushroom balls, each the size and shape of a human skull, thinned in yellowy white, stood blindly sentinel. Liffey was on her feet, shuddering and aghast.

‘They’re only puffballs,’ said Richard. ‘Nature’s bounty.

They come up overnight. What’s the matter with you?’

The matter was that the smooth round swelling of the fungus made Liffey think of a belly swollen by pregnancy, and she said so. Richard found another one, but its growth had been stunted by tangled conch-grass, and its surface was convoluted, brownish and rubbery.

‘This one looks like a brain in some laboratory jar,’ said Richard.

Him and me, thought Liffey, trembling as if aware that the invisible bird of disaster, flying by, had glanced with its wings. Him and me.

Bella and Ray came round from the back of the house.

‘We knew we’d find you round here,’ said Ray. ‘Bella took a bet on it. They’ll be at it again, she said. I think she’s jealous. What have you found?’

‘Puffballs,’ said Richard.

‘Puffballs!’

‘Puffballs!’

Ray and Bella, animated, ran forward to see.

Liffey saw them all of a sudden with cold eyes, in clear sunlight, and knew that they were grotesque. Bella’s lank hair was tightly pulled back, and her nose was bulbous and her long neck was scrawny and her eyes popped as if the dollmaker had failed to press them properly into the mould. Her tired breasts pushed sadly into her white T-shirt: the skin on her arms was coarse and slack. Ray was white in the bright sunlight, pale and puffy and rheumy. He wore jeans and an open shirt as if he were a young man, but he wasn’t. A pendant hung round his neck and nestled in grey, wiry, unhuman hairs. In the city, running across busy streets, jumping in and out of taxis, opening food from the Take Away, they seemed ordinary enough. Put them against a background of growing green, under a clear sky, and you could see how strange they were.

‘You simply have to take the cottage,’ said Bella, ‘if only to bring us puffballs. Have you any idea how rare they are?’

‘What do you do with them?’ asked Liffey.

‘Eat them,’ said Ray. ‘Slice them, grill them, stuff them: they have a wonderful creamy texture—like just ripe Camembert. We’ll do some tonight under the roast beef.’ ‘I don’t like Camembert,’ was all Liffey could think of to say.

Ray bent and plucked one of the puffballs from its base, fingers gently cupping its globe from beneath, careful not to break the taut, stretched skin. He handed it to Bella and picked a second.

Tucker came along the other side of the stream. Cows followed him: black and white Friesians, full bumping bellies swaying from side to side. A dog brought up the rear. It was a quiet, orderly procession.

‘Oh my God,’ said Bella. ‘Cows!’

‘They won’t hurt you,’ said Liffey.

‘Cows kill four people a year in this country,’ said Bella, who always had a statistic to back up a fear.

‘Afternoon,’ said Tucker, amiably across the stream.

‘We’re not on your land?’ enquired Ray.

‘Not mine,’ said Tucker. ‘That’s no one’s you’re on, that’s waiting for an owner.’

He was splashing through the water towards them. ‘You thinking of taking it? Good piece of land, your side of the stream, better than mine this side.’

He was across. He saw the remaining puffball. He drew back his leg and kicked it, and it burst, as if it had been under amazing tension, into myriad pieces which buzzed through the air like a maddened insect crowd, and then settled on the ground and were still.

‘Him or me,’ thought Liffey. But just at the moment Tucker kicked she felt a pain in her middle, so she knew it was her, and was glad, in her nice way, that Richard was saved. Her tummy: his brain. Well, better kicked to death by a farmer than sliced and cooked under roast beef by Bella and Ray.

‘If you want to spread the spores,’ said Ray to Tucker, ‘that’s the best way.’

‘Disgusting things,’ said Tucker. ‘No use for anything except footballs.’

He told them the name of the estate agent who dealt with the property and left, well pleased with himself. His cows munched solemly on, on the other side of the brook, bulky and soft-eyed.

‘I hate cows,’ said Bella.

‘I rather like them,’ said Ray. ‘Plump and female.’

Bella, who was not so much slim as scrawny, took this as an attack, and rightly so.

They drove back to London with Bella’s mouth set like a trap and Ray’s arm muscles sinewy, so tight was his grasp on the steering wheel. Liffey admired the muscles. Richard, though broad and brave, was a soft man; not fat, but unmuscled. Richard’s hands were white and smooth. Tucker’s, she had noticed, were gnarled, rough and grimy, like the earth. A faint sweet smell of puffball filled the car.

Inside Liffey (2)

The pain Liffey felt was nothing to do with Tucker’s kicking of the puffball. It was a mid-cycle pain—the kind of pain quite commonly, if inexplicably, felt by women who take the contraceptive pill. It is not an ovulation pain, for such women do not ovulate. But the pain is felt, nevertheless, and at that time.

Liffey, on this particular September day, was twelve days in to her one-hundred-and-seventy-first menstrual cycle. She had reached the menarche rather later than the average girl, at fifteen years and three months.

Liffey’s mother Madge, worried, had taken her to the doctor when she was fourteen-and-a-half. ‘She isn’t menstruating,’ said Madge, bleakly. Madge was often bleak. ‘Why?’ ‘She’s of slight build,’ the doctor said. ‘And by and large, the lighter the girl, the later the period.’

Liffey, at the time, had no desire whatsoever to start menstruating, and took her mother’s desire that she should as punitive. Liffey, unlike her mother, but like most women, had never cared to think too much about what was going on inside her body. She regarded the inner, pounding, pulsating Liffey with distaste, seeing it as something formless and messy and uncontrollable, and being uncontrollable, better unacknowledged. She would rather think about, and identify wholly with, the outer Liffey. Pale and pretty and nice.

It was not even possible to accept, as it were, a bodily status quo, for her body kept changing. Processes quite unknown to her, and indeed for the most part unnoticeable, had gone on inside Liffey since the age of seven when her ovaries had begun to release the first secretions of oestrogen, and as the contours of her body had begun their change from child to woman, so had vulva, clitoris, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries, unseen and unconsidered, begun their own path to maturity. The onset of menstruation would occur when her body dictated, and not when the doctor, or Madge, or Liffey felt proper.

Her menstrual cycle, once established, was of a steady, almost relentless twenty-eight-day rhythm, which Liffey assumed to be only her right. Other girls were early, or late, or undecided: trickled and flooded and stopped and started. But as the sun went down every twenty-eight days, from the one-hundred-and-eighty-fourth calendar month of her life, Liffey started to bleed. Being able so certainly to predict this gave her at least the illusion of being in control of her body.

Liffey never enquired of anyone as to why she bled, or what use the bleeding served. She knew vaguely it was to do with having babies, and thought of it, if she thought at all, as all her old internal rubbish being cleared away.

The mechanics of her menstrual cycle were indeed ingenious.

Lunar month by lunar month, since she reached the menarche, Liffey’s pituitary gland had pursued its own cycle: secreting first, for a fourteen-day stretch, the hormones which would stimulate the growth of follicles in Liffey’s ovaries. These follicles, some hundred or so cyst-like nodules, in their turn secreted oestrogen, and would all grow until, on the fourteenth day (at any rate in the years she was not taking the pill) the biggest and best would drop off into the outer end of one of Liffey’s fallopian tubes and there, unfertilised, would rupture, allowing its oestrogen to be absorbed. This was the signal for the remaindered follicles to atrophy: and for Liffey’s pituitary to start secreting, for a further twelve days, a hormone which would promote the formation of a corpus luteum which would secrete progresterone and flourish until the twenty-sixth day, when the pituitary withdrew its supplies. Then the corpus luteum would start to degenerate and on the twenty-eighth day be disposed of in the form of menstrual flow—along, of course, with the lining of Liffey’s uterus, hopefully and richly thickened over the previous twenty-eight days to receive a fertilised ovum, but so far, on one-hundred-and-seventy occasions, disappointed.

The disintegration and shedding of the uterus lining, signalled by the withdrawal of oestrogen, would take three days and thereafter the amount of blood lost would gradually diminish as the uterus healed. On this, the twelfth day into Liffey’s cycle, the seventy-seventh follicle in the left fallopian tube was outstripping its fellows, distending the surface of the ovary as a cystic swelling almost half an inch in diameter—but owing to the fact that Liffey had been taking the pill, her body had been hoodwinked so that the ovum would have no time to actually fall, but would merely atrophy along with its fellows.

Did a tremor of disappointment shake Liffey’s body? Did the thwarting of so much organic organisation register on her consciousness? Certainly she had a pain, and certainly Mabs’ eyes flickered as Liffey winced, but that too could be coincidence.

Mothers

Mabs and Tucker walked up to Honeycomb Cottage. They liked to go walking over their land, and that of their neighbours, just to see what was happening. As people in cities turn to plays or films for event, so did Mabs and Tucker turn to the tracks of badgers, or observe the feathers where the fox had been, or the owl; or fret at just how much the summer had dried the stream, or the rain swelled it. A field, which to a stranger is just a field, to those who know it is a battleground for combatant plant and animal life, and the traces of victory and defeat are everywhere.

Tucker came across another puffball and kicked it, taking a run, letting a booted foot fly, entering energetically into the conflict. ‘Nasty unnatural things,’ said Mabs. She remembered her mother before her sister Carol had been born, and the swollen white of her belly as she lifted her skirt and squatted to urinate, as was her custom, in the back garden. Mabs’ mother Mrs Tree thought it was wasteful to let good powerful bodily products vanish down the water closet. This belief was a source of much bitterness and shame to her two daughters, and one of the reasons they married so early.

Mrs Tree was a herbalist, in the old tradition. Her enemies, and she had many, said she was a witch, and even her friends recognised her as a wise woman. On moonlit nights, even now, she would switch off the television and go gathering herbs—mugwort and comfrey, cowslip and henbane, or any of the hundred or more plants she knew by sight and name. She would scrape roots and strip bark, would simmer concoctions of this or that on her gas-stove, at home with distillations and precipitations. The drugs she prepared—as her mother’s before her—were the same as the local doctor had to offer: psychoactive agents, prophylactics, antiseptics, narcotics, hypnotics, anaesthetics and antibiotics. But Mrs Tree’s medicines served, in overdose, not just to restore a normal body chemistry, but to incite to love and hate, violence and passivity, to bring about increased sexual activity or impotence, pain, irritability, skin disease, wasting away, and even death. She made an uneasy mother.

‘Does your mother use puffballs?’ Tucker asked Mabs. Mabs didn’t reply and he knew he should not have asked. She liked to pretend that her mother was just like anyone else. But Tucker, as was only natural in the circumstances, would roll food around in his mouth before he swallowed, searching for strange tastes. Such knowledge passed from mother to daughter.

‘Puffballs are too nasty even for my mum,’ said Mabs, presently. ‘They’re the devil’s eyeballs.’

‘Isn’t it dark and poky!’ said Mabs, pushing open the front door of Honeycomb Cottage. ‘I’d rather have a nice new bungalow any day. But the view’s good, I’ll say that.’

Mabs waved at Glastonbury Tor, in a familiar kind of way, as she went inside. The sun was setting behind the hill, in a blood red sky.

‘I wonder if they’ll live like pigs,’ said Mabs, ‘the way they act like pigs,’ and she looked at Tucker slyly out of the corner of her eye so that he started grunting and waddling like a pig and pushed her with his belly into the corner and bore down upon her, laughing: and they made love in the red light that shone in diamonds through the latticed windows.

‘So she’s too skinny for you, is she,’ said Mabs, presently.

‘Yes,’ said Tucker.

‘You might have to learn to like it,’ said Mabs. ‘Just once or twice.’

‘Why’s that?’ asked Tucker, surprised.

‘It’s important to have a hold,’ said Mabs. ‘You can’t be too careful with neighbours.’

‘You wouldn’t like it,’ said Tucker. ‘Not one bit.’

‘I’m not the jealous type,’ said Mabs. ‘You know that.

Not if there’s something to be got out of it. I don’t mind things done on purpose. It’s things done by accident I don’t like.’

They walked back hand in hand to Cadbury Farm. She was so large and slow, and he was so small and lively, they had to keep their hands locked to stay in pace with one another.

The dogs in the courtyard barked and Tucker kicked them.

‘They’re hungry,’ Mabs protested.

‘A good watchdog is always hungry,’ said Tucker. ‘That’s what makes it good.’

The children were hungry as well, but Mabs reserved her sympathy for the dogs. Mabs had five children. The eldest, Audrey, was fourteen. The youngest, Kevin, was four. Mabs slapped small hands as they crept over the tabletop to steal crusts from the paste sandwiches she prepared for their tea. All her children were thin. Presently Mabs picked up a wooden spoon and used that as a cane, to save her own hand smarting as she slapped. One of the children gave a cry of pain.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ said Tucker, taking notice.

‘My children. I do as I please.’ She did, too, according to mood.

‘You’re too hard on them.’

She said nothing.

Her breasts were full and round beneath the old sweater.

Tucker’s eyelids drooped in memory of them.

‘Get the bleeding sauce,’ Mabs shouted at Eddie. Eddie was her third child, and irritated her most, and she slapped and shouted at him more than she did the others. He took after her, being large and slow. She preferred her children to take after Tucker. That cruel audacity which in Mabs was almost attractive, was in Eddie something nasty and sly: she had slapped and startled him too often: he lived in the expectation of sudden disaster, and now cringed in corners. Nobody liked him. He was eight now and it would be the same when he was eighty. Audrey, Mabs’ eldest, looked after him. She was kind where her mother was cruel, and clever at her books. Mabs took her books away because she put on airs.

Mabs and Tucker ate fish fingers and tinned spaghetti. The children made do with the sandwiches.

That night Mabs sat at the window and watched a sudden storm blow up over the Tor. Black clouds streamed out from it, like steam from a kettle, and formed into solid masses at the corners of the sky. Lightning leapt between the clouds. Thunder rumbled and rolled, but the rain did not start.

‘Come to bed,’ said Tucker.

‘There are people in Honeycomb Cottage,’ said Mabs. But Tucker couldn’t see them, although he came to stand beside her. Lightning lit up the interior of the rooms, and made strange shapes which could have been anything.

‘What sort of people?’ he asked, cautiously.

‘Him and her,’ said Mabs. ‘It won’t be long now.’

‘At it again, are they?’

‘No,’ said Mabs. ‘They were in opposite corners of the room. She was holding a baby.’

‘I know what’s the matter with you,’ said Tucker. ‘You want another baby.’

‘No I don’t,’ she said, but he knew she did. Her youngest child was four years old. Mabs liked to be pregnant. Tucker wondered how long it would be before she began to think it was his fault, and what means she would find to punish him. ‘Come to bed,’ he said, ‘and we’ll see what we can do.’

It was a rare thing for him to ask. Usually she was there first, lying in wait, half inviting, half commanding, a channel for forces greater than herself. Come on, quick, again, again! Impregnate, fertilise; by your will, Tucker, which is only partly your will, set the forces of division and multiplication going. Now!

Inside Liffey (3)

Liffey was off the pill.

Liffey’s pituitary gland was once more its own master and stimulated the production of oestrogen and progesterone as it saw fit: no longer, by its inactivity, hoodwinking her body into believing it was pregnant. Liffey became a little thinner: her breasts a little smaller: her temperament a little more volatile. She was conscious of an increase in sexual desire although she was still obliged to pretend, for Richard’s sake, and in the interest of her own self-esteem, to have orgasms. Not that this affected her fertility, for orgasm and ovulation in the human female are not connected, as in other species they sometimes are. And although sexual desire itself can on occasion prompt ovulation, overriding the pituitary’s clockwork timing, the element of surprise which brings this rare phenomenon about (and much distress to rape victims and deflowered virgins) was not present in Richard’s lovemaking with Liffey.

Liffey’s menstrual cycle was thus quickly restored to its normal rhythm. Liffey, all the same, did not become pregnant. Two more lunar months went by. Two more ova dropped, decayed and were disposed of.

Liffey’s chance of becoming pregnant, which was ninety-five per cent when she was a teenager, was by now down by some six per cent and would continue to diminish, slightly, year by year, as would Richard’s, until by the time he was sixty his fertility rate would be down by ninety per cent, and hers, of course, would be nil.

In their favour, both were still young: intercourse occurred at least four times a week, and Richard’s sperms were almost always present in the outer part of Liffey’s fallopian tubes, waiting for ovulation to occur. Against them was the fact that Richard had flu in November, and his sperm count was perhaps temporarily rather low: and Liffey had only just come off the pill. There were the many other statistical probabilities of conception to take into account. Had Liffey known all this, she would perhaps not have lain awake at night, fearing—for although she did not want a baby she certainly did not want to be infertile—that she was barren and that some cosmic punishment had been visited upon her.

It was a matter of time, nothing else, before she conceived.

In-Laws and Secretaries

Liffey’s mother Madge was a lean, hard-drinking, prematurely white-haired teacher of chemistry in a girls’ school in East Anglia. She had never married, nor wished to, and Liffey was not so much a love child as a gesture of defiance to a straitlaced world. Madge had thought to bear a warrior son, but had given birth to Liffey instead, and Liffey had compounded the error by attempting, throughout her childhood, to chirrup and charm her way into Madge’s affections. Madge, hearing that Liffey was trying to have a baby, commented then to a friend, ‘Silence for six months and then this. Not that she’s pregnant, not that she’s miscarried—just that she’s trying to have a baby. How’s that for a piece of non-news?’

‘I expect she thought it would please you,’ said the friend, who was only there for the whisky.

‘It doesn’t,’ said Madge. ‘Liffey is an only child and an only grandchild. Nature is clearly trying to breed the line out. Trust Liffey to interfere with the proper course of things.’

Madge did not want Liffey to be pregnant. She did not want to think of herself diluting down through the generations. She craved mortality.

Richard’s father, on the other hand, living in early retirement in a fisherman’s cottage in Cornwall, was glad to think that his line might well continue, now that Liffey was off the pill. Richard’s mother was made nervous by the news—as if some trouble, pacing for years behind at a steady distance, had suddenly broken into a jog and overtaken her. She started knitting at once, but there was a tenseness in her hands, and the nylon wool cut into her fingers.

The Lee-Foxes looked a placid enough couple—well-heeled, grey-haired, conventional and companionable—but the effort to appear so cost them a good deal in nervous energy. He had ulcers; she, migraines.

‘It’s too early to start knitting,’ said Mr Lee-Fox. ‘She’s not even pregnant: they’re just trying.’

‘Richard always does what he sets out to do,’ said Mrs Lee-Fox, loyally.

‘Your fingers are bleeding,’ said Mr Lee-Fox. ‘Whatever is the matter?’

She wept, for answer.

‘Little garments,’ said Mr Lee-Fox, in wonder, ‘stained by blood and tears!’

Mr Lee-Fox could not understand why, having worked hard to achieve a reasonable home and a happy life and done so at last, troubles should still keep occurring. It was his wife’s fault, he concluded. She was discontented by nature. He hoped, for his son Richard’s sake, that Liffey was not the same.

‘You mustn’t worry,’ he said. ‘Liffey will come through with flying colours. Wait and see.’

Liffey was at the time extremely discontented, which made her more loving and lively than ever. Chirruping and charming. Sometimes, when she woke up in the apartment, opening her eyes to the concrete wall of the house next door, and the sound of traffic instead of the sound of birds, she thought she was a child again, and in her mother’s house.

The trouble was that Richard, telephoning Dick Hubbard the estate agent about Honeycomb Cottage, had been told that the cottage was for sale, and not to rent, and Richard had said they could not afford it.

‘We could spend some of my money,’ said Liffey. ‘No, we couldn’t,’ said Richard firmly. ‘I’m not going to live off you. What kind of man would that make me?’

By mutual consent, throughout their marriage, Liffey’s money had been used to buy small things, not large things. Confectionery as it were, but not the matrimonial home.

‘Then let’s sell this place and buy that.’

‘No. It isn’t ours to sell.’

The apartment had been a wedding gift from Mr and Mrs Lee-Fox. Disapproving of Liffey as a bride for Richard, they had sacrificed their own comfort and security and spent an inordinate amount on the present. Thus they hoped both to disguise their feelings and remain securely sealed in the ranks of the happy and blessed.

When Richard came home from his boarding school bruised and stunned, victim of bullying, they would seem not to notice.

‘Such a wonderful school,’ they’d say to friends. ‘He’s so happy there.’

Liffey searched the newspapers for cottages to rent but found nothing. Another month passed: another egg dropped, and failed. Liffey bled; Richard frowned, perplexed.

Liffey took a temporary job in a solicitor’s office. The quality of her cooking deteriorated. She served Richard burnt food and tossed and turned all night, keeping him awake. She did not know she did it, but do it she did. She had come off the pill, after all, and still they lived in London.

‘If Liffey can’t have children,’ asked Annie, Richard’s secretary, ‘would you stick by her?’

‘Of course,’ said Richard immediately and stoutly. But the question increased his anxiety.

Annie read cookery books in her lunch hour, propping them in her electric typewriter. She took an easy and familiar approach to her job, and felt no deference towards anyone. She had spent a year working in the States and had lost, or so it seemed to Richard, her sense of the nuances of respect owing between man and woman, powerful and humble, employer and employed.

Her fair hair hung over the typewriter like a veil. She had a boyfriend who was a diamond merchant and one-time bodyguard to General Dayan. She had wide blue eyes, and a rounded figure. Liffey had never seen her. Once she asked Richard what Annie looked like—tentatively, because she did not want to sound possessive or jealous.

‘Fat,’ said Richard.

And because Annie had a flat, nasal telephone voice Liffey had assumed she was one of the plain, efficient girls whom large organisations are obliged to employ to make up for the pretty ones they like to keep up front.

Besides.

When Richard and Liffey married they had agreed to tell one another at once if some new emotional or physical involvement seemed likely, and Liffey believed the agreement still held.

Christmas approached, and Liffey stopped work in order to concentrate upon it, and decorate the Christmas tree properly. She had her gifts bought by the second week in December, and then spent another week wrapping and adorning. She was asked to Richard’s office party but didn’t go. She did not like his office parties. Everyone looked so ugly, except Richard, and everyone got drunk.

Liffey arranged to meet Richard at a restaurant after the party. She expected him at nine. By ten he had not arrived, so she went round to the office, in case he had had too much to drink or there had been an accident. In no sense, as she explained and explained afterwards, was she spying on him.

The office was a massive new concrete block, with a marble-lined lobby and decorative lifts. Richard’s employers were an international company, recently diversified from oil into films and food products—the latter being Richard’s division, and he a Junior Assistant Brand Manager. If it were not for Liffey’s private income, she would have had to work and earn, or else live very poorly indeed. As it was, lack of financial anxiety made Richard bold in his decisions and confident in his approach to his superiors, which was duly noted and appreciated, and boded well for his future.

Liffey went up in the lift to Richard’s office, walking through empty corridors, still rich with the after-party haze of cigarette smoke and the aroma from a hundred half-empty glasses. From behind the occasional closed door came a cry, or a giggle or a moan. Liffey found Richard behind his desk, on the floor with Annie, who was not one of the plain ones after all, just plump and luscious, and all but naked, except for veils of hair. So was Richard. Liffey went home by taxi. Richard followed after. He was maudlin drunk, sick on the step, and passed out in the hall. Liffey dragged him to bed, undressed his stubborn body and left him alone. She sat at the window staring out at the street.

She felt that she was destroyed. Everything was finished—love, trust, marriage, happiness. All over.

But of course it was not. Richard’s contrition was wonderful to behold. He begged forgiveness: he held Liffey’s hand. He pleaded, with some justification, total amnesia of the event. Someone had poured vodka into the fruit cup. It was Annie’s fault, if anyone’s. Richard loved Liffey, only Liffey. Love flowed between them again, lubricating Liffey’s passages, promoting spermatogenesis in Richard’s testes, encouraging the easy flow of seminal fluid from seminal vesicles and prostate to the entrance of the urethra, and thence, by a series of rhythmic muscular contractions, into Liffey.

Love, and none the worse for all that: but earthly love. Spiritual love, the love of God for man, and man for God, cannot be debased, as can earthly love, by such description.

Still Liffey did not get pregnant.

Annie was transferred to another office. After the annual Christmas party there was a general shifting round of secretarial staff. A stolid and respectful girl, Miss Martin, took Annie’s place. Her plumpness was not soft and natural, as was Annie’s, but solid and unwelcoming, and encased by elasticated garments. Her face was impassive, and her manner was prim; Richard was not attracted to her at all, and was relieved to find he was not. He had lately been having trouble with sudden upsurges of sexual interest in the most inappropriate people. He confided as much in Bella.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Bella, ‘you can’t be expected to stay faithful to one person all your life, just because you married them.’ Richard quite disliked Bella for a time, for giving voice to what he saw as cheap and easy cynicism. He still believed in romantic love, and was ashamed of his lapse with Annie: his sudden succumbing to animal lust. He decided that Liffey and he would see less of Bella and Ray.

Christmas Pledges

Liffey’s birthday was on Christmas Day, a fact which annoyed Madge, who was a proselytising atheist.

They were to spend Christmas with Richard’s parents. They journeyed down to Cornwall on the night of Christmas Eve: there was a hard frost. The night landscape sparkled under the moon. Richard and Liffey were drunk with love and Richard’s remorse. The back of the car was piled high with presents, beautifully wrapped and ribboned. They took with them a Thermos of good real coffee, laced with brandy, and chicken sandwiches. They went by the A 303, down past Windsor, on to the motorway, leaving at the Hungerford exit, and down through Berkshire and Wiltshire, crossing Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge stood in the moonlight, ominous and amazing, dwarfing its wire palisade. Then on into Somerset, past Glastonbury Tor, into Devon and finally over the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall.

Liffey loved Richard too much to even mention Honeycomb Cottage, although they passed within five miles of it.

Christmas Day was bright, cold, and wild. Mr and Mrs Lee-Fox’s cottage was set into the Cornish cliffs. A storm arose, and sea spray dashed against the double glazing but all was safe and warm and hospitable within. The roast turkey was magnificent, the Christmas tree charming, and Liffey’s presents proved most acceptable—two hand-made patchwork quilts, one for each twin bed. Liffey loved giving. Her mother, Madge, did not. They had once spent Christmas with Madge, rather than with Richard’s parents, and had a chilly bleak time of it. Madge liked to be working, not rejoicing.

Mr and Mrs Lee-Fox agreed, under their quilts on Christmas night, that at least Liffey kept Richard happy and lively, and at least this year had worn a T-shirt thick enough to hide her nipples.

On their way back to London they made a detour out of Glastonbury and into Crossley, and passed Dick Hubbard’s estate agency. There was room to park outside, for the Christmas holiday, stretching further and further forward to grab in the New Year, kept most of the shops and offices closed. And Dick Hubbard’s door was open. Richard stopped.

‘Townspeople,’ said Dick Hubbard, looking down from his private office on the first floor. ‘Back from the Christmas holidays, and looking for a country cottage to rent, for twopence halfpenny a week. They’re out of luck.’

He was a large, fleshy man in his late forties, at home in pubs, virile in bed; indolent. His wife had died in a riding accident shortly after his liaison with Carol had begun. Carol was smaller and slighter than her sister Mabs, but just as determined.

‘There’s Honeycomb Cottage,’ said Carol.

‘That’s for sale, not for rent. I’m holding on until prices stop rising.’

‘Then you’ll hold on for ever,’ said Carol. ‘And in the meanwhile it will all fall down. Mabs says it’s already an eyesore. She’s quite put out about it.’

‘Mabs had better not start interfering,’ said Dick, ‘or she’ll lose her grazing.’ But no one in Crossley, not even Dick Hubbard, liked to think of Mabs being put out, and when Richard and Liffey enquired about Honeycomb Cottage, they were told it was to rent on a full repairing lease for twenty pounds a week.

‘Done,’ said Richard.

‘Done,’ said Dick Hubbard.

They shook hands.

‘In the country,’ said Liffey, as they got back into the car, ‘the word of a gentleman still means something. People trust one another. You’re going to love it, Richard.’ ‘It’s certainly easy to do business,’ said Richard.

They decided to rent the London apartment to friends, and let the income from one pay for the outgoings on the other.

‘We could get thirty a week for the flat,’ said Liffey. ‘And the extra can pay for your fares.’

It was a long time since she had been anywhere by train.

After Richard and Liffey had gone, Dick Hubbard returned to his interrupted lovemaking with Carol.

‘Didn’t they even ask for a lease?’ asked Carol.

‘No,’ said Dick.

‘You’ll do all right there,’ said Carol.

‘I know,’ said Dick.

Friends

On the morning of December 30th, Liffey rang up her friend, Helen, who was married to Mory, an architect. The friendship was not of long standing. Liffey had met Helen in the waiting room of an employment agency a year ago, and struck up an acquaintance.

After the manner of young married women, still under the obligation of total loyalty to a husband, Liffey had cut loose from her school and college friends, as if fearing that their very existence might merit a rash confidence, a betrayal of her love for Richard. She made do, now, with a kind of surface intimacy with this new acquaintance or that, and since she did not offer any indication of need or distress, or any real exchange of feeling, the friendships did not ripen. Liffey did not like to display weakness: and weakness admitted is the very stuff of good friendship.

Mory and Richard had met over a dinner table or so, and discussed the black holes of space, and Richard, less acute in his social than his business relationships, thought he recognised a fellow spirit.

So now Liffey went to Helen and Mory for help.

‘Helen? Sorry to ring so early but Helen we’ve rented a most darling cottage in the country and now all we have to do is find someone for this flat and we can move out of London in a fortnight, and I was wondering if you could help?’

There was a pause.

‘How much?’ enquired Helen.

‘Richard says forty pounds a week but I think that’s greedy. Twenty would be more like it.’

‘I should think so,’ said Helen. ‘If you can’t find anyone Mory and I could take it, I suppose, to help you out.’ ‘But that would be wonderful,’ cried Liffey. ‘I’d be so grateful! You’d look after everything and it would all be safe with you.’

Liffey sorted, washed, wrapped, packed and cleaned for two weeks. Friends rather mysteriously disappeared, instead of helping. She had no idea she and Richard had accumulated so many possessions. She gave away clothes and furniture to Oxfam. She found old photographs of herself and Richard and laughed and cried at the absurdity of life. She wrapped her hair in a spotted bandana to keep out clouds of dust. She wanted everything to be nice for Helen and Mory. Charming, talented, scatty Helen. Mory, the genius architect, temporarily unemployed. Lovely to be able to help!

‘Friendship,’ Liffey said, ‘is all about helping.’

‘Um,’ said Richard. Five years ago the remark would have enchanted, not embarrassed him.

‘Don’t you think so, Bella,’ persisted Liffey, not getting the expected response from Richard.

‘I daresay,’ said Bella, politely. Ray was out visiting friends who had a sixteen-year-old daughter he was helping through a Home Economics examination. Bella was in a bad, fidgety mood. Richard knew Ray was making her unhappy and from charity had lifted the embargo on the friendship. And Bella was being very kind; the kindest, in fact, of all their friends, offering packing cases, time, concern, and showing an interest in the details of the move. Now, on the eve of their departure for the country, she gave them spaghetti bolognese. The sauce came from a can. Richard followed Bella into the kitchen. Liffey had gone to the bathroom.

‘Liffey’s a lucky little girl,’ said Bella, ‘having a husband to indulge her so.’

Bella kissed Richard full on the lips, startling him.

‘If you’re not careful,’ said Bella, ‘Liffey will still be a little girl when she’s got grey hairs and you’re an old, old man.’ She dabbed his mouth with a tissue.

‘You’re going to hate the country,’ said Bella. ‘You’re going to be so lonely.’

‘We have each other,’ said Richard.

Bella laughed.

Liffey came back from the bathroom with a long face.

‘No baby?’ asked Bella.

‘No baby,’ said Liffey. ‘I’m sorry, Richard. Once we’re in the country I’m sure it will happen.’

The removal van arrived on the morning of Wednesday, January 7th. Liffey’s period was soon to finish. She was in a progesterone phase.

Richard took the day off from work. They followed the furniture van in the car, and left the key under the mat for Mory and Helen. There was no need of a lease, or a rent book, between friends.

‘Goodbye, you horrible town,’ cried Liffey. ‘Hello country!

Nature, here we come!’ Richard wished she wouldn’t, Bella’s words in his mind. And, he rather feared, Bella’s lips. He had never thought of her as a sexual entity before. Mory and Helen moved in a couple of hours after Richard and Liffey had left. With them came Helen’s pregnant sister and her unemployed boyfriend, both of whom now had the required permanent address from which to claim Social Security benefits.

Honeycomb Cottage, in January, was perhaps colder and damper than Liffey had expected, and the rooms smaller: and the banisters had to come down before any furniture could get in, and Richard sawed the double bed in two to get it into the bedroom, but Liffey was happy, brave and positive, and by Wednesday evening had fires lit, decorative branches, however bare, in vases, and a cosy space cleared amongst chaos for a delicious celebration meal of bottled caviar, fillet steak (from Harrods), a whole pound of mushrooms between them, and champagne.

‘All this,’ marvelled Liffey, ‘and five pounds a week profit!’ She’d forgotten how much she’d asked Helen to pay, in the end. ‘You’re leaving out the fares,’ murmured Richard, but not too loud, for it was always unkind to present Liffey with too much reality all at once. Fares would amount to some thirty pounds a week. Liffey had bought a whole crate of new books—from thrillers, new novels, to heavy works on sociology and philosophy, which she intended to dole out to Richard day by day, for the improvement of his mind on the morning journey, and his diversion on the evening train—and Richard was touched.

‘It’s very quiet,’ said Richard, looking out into the blank, bleak wet night. ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do with yourself all day.’

‘I love the quietness,’ said Liffey. ‘And the solitude. Just you and me—oh, we are the most enviable of people! Everyone else just dreams, but we’ve actually done it.’

That night they slept on foam rubber in front of the fire, but did not make love, for they were exhausted. Richard wondered why someone so old and scraggy and cynical as Bella should be so attractive. Perhaps true love and sexual excitement were mutually exclusive.

Realities

On Thursday morning Liffey’s little alarm watch woke them at six. Liffey was up in a trice to make Richard’s breakfast. The hot water system was not working and there was ice in the wash basin, but he laughed bravely. Liffey had the times of the trains written out and pinned up above the mantelpiece. She tried to light the kitchen stove but the chimney was cold, and filled the room with smoke. She could not get the kettle to boil: she plugged in the toaster and all the electricity in the house fused: she could not grind the coffee beans for coffee. The transistor radio produced only crackle—clearly here it would need an aerial. Richard stopped smiling. Liffey danced and kissed and pinched and hugged, and he managed a wan smile, as he found the old candles he’d noticed in the fuse box. ‘I suppose, darling, they’d die if you took another day off work?’

‘Yes, they would,’ said Richard, longing for the warmth and shiny bright order of the office, and the solidarity of Miss Martin who never pranced or kissed, but offered him hot instant coffee in plastic mugs at orderly intervals.

Richard left the house at seven-thirty. Castle Tor station was twelve minutes’ drive away, and the train left at seven fifty-two.

‘Allow lots of time,’ said Liffey, ‘this first morning.’

Richard was delayed by the cow mire outside Cadbury Farm. The little Renault sank almost to its axles in the slime, for it had thawed overnight, and what the day before had been a hard surface now revealed its true nature. But revving and reversing freed the vehicle, though it woke the dogs, and he arrived, heart beating fast, at Castle Tor station at seven fifty. The station was closed. As he stood, open-mouthed, the fast train shot through.

Richard arrived back at Honeycomb Cottage at five minutes past eight. He stepped inside and slapped Liffey on the face, as she straightened up from lighting the fire, face blackened by soot.

Castle Tor station was closed all winter. Liffey had been reading the summer timetable. The nearest station was Taunton, on another line, twenty miles away. The journey from there to Paddington would take three hours. Six hours a day, thirty hours a week, spent sitting on a train, was clearly intolerable. And another eight hours a week spent driving to and from the station. To drive to London, on congested roads, would take even longer.

Richard hissed all this to Liffey, got back into his car, and drove off again.

Liffey cried.

‘I wonder what all that was about,’ said Tucker, putting down the field glasses.

‘Go on up and find out,’ said Mabs.

‘No, you go,’ he said.

So later in the morning Mabs put on her Wellington boots and her old brown coat with the missing buttons and paddled through the mire to Honeycomb Cottage and made herself known to Liffey as friend and neighbour.

‘Do come in,’ cried Liffey. ‘How kind of you to call! Coffee?’

Mabs looked at Liffey and knew she was a bubble of city froth, floating on the scummy surface of the sea of humanity, breakable between finger and thumb. Liffey trusted the world and Mabs despised her for it. ‘I’d rather have tea,’ said Mabs.

Liffey bent to riddle the fire and her little buttocks were tight and rounded, defined beneath stretched denim. The backside of a naughty child, not of a grown woman, who knows the power and murk that lies beneath, and shrouds herself in folds of cloth. So thought Mabs.

Liffey was a candy on the shelf of a high-class confectioner’s shop. Mabs would have her down and take her in and chew her up and suck her through, and when she had extracted every possible kind of nourishment, would spit her out, carelessly.

Liffey looked at Mabs and saw a smiling, friendly countrywoman with a motherly air and no notion at all how to make the best of herself.

Liffey was red-eyed but had forgiven Richard for hitting her. She could understand that he was upset. And it had been careless of her to have misread the train timetable. But she was confident that he would be back that evening with roses and apologies and sensible plans as to how to solve the commuting problem. And if it were in fact insoluble, then they would just have to move back into the London apartment, apologising to Mory and Helen for having inconvenienced them, and keep Honeycomb as a weekend cottage. Liffey could afford it, even if Richard couldn’t. His pride, his vision of himself as husband and provider, would perhaps have to be dented, just a little. That was all.

Nothing terrible had happened. If you were an ordinary, reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-intentioned person, nothing terrible could happen. Surely.

Liffey shivered.

‘Anything the matter?’ asked Mabs.

‘No,’ said Liffey, lying. Lying was second nature to Liffey, for Madge her mother always spoke the truth. Families tend to share out qualities amongst them, this one balancing that, and in families of two, as in the case of Madge and Liffey, the result can be absurd.

At that very moment Mory, who had brutal, concrete architectural tastes, looked round Liffey’s pretty apartment and said, ‘Christ, Liffey has awful taste!’ and then, ‘Shall we burn that?’ and Helen nodded, and Mory took a little bamboo wall shelf and snapped it between cruel, smooth, city hands and fed it into the fire so that they all felt warmer.

‘I hope Dick Hubbard’s given you a proper lease,’ said Mabs. ‘You can’t trust that man an inch.’

‘Richard sees to all that,’ said Liffey and Mabs thought, good, she’s the fool she seems.

Mabs was all kindness. She gave Liffey the names of doctors, dentist, thatcher, plumber and electrician.

‘You don’t want to let this place run down,’ she said. ‘It could be a real little love nest.’

Liffey was happy. She had found a friend in Mabs. Mabs was real and warm and direct and without affectation. In the clear light of Mabs, her former friends, the coffee-drinking, trinket-buying, theatre-going young women of her London acquaintance, seemed like mouthing wraiths.

A flurry of cloud had swept over from the direction of the Tor and left a sprinkling of thin snow, and then the wind had died as suddenly as it had sprung up, and now the day was bright and sparkling, and flung itself in through the window, so that she caught her breath at the beauty of it all. Somehow she and Richard would stay here. She knew it.

Mabs stood in the middle of her kitchen as if she were a tree grown roots, and she, Liffey, was some slender plant swaying beneath her shelter, and they were all part of the same earth, same purpose.

‘Anything the matter?’ asked Mabs again, wondering if Liffey were half-daft as well.

‘Just thinking,’ said Liffey, but there were tears in her eyes. Some benign spirit had touched her as it flew. Mabs was uneasy: her own malignity increased. The moment passed.

Mabs helped Liffey unpack and put straight, and half-envied and half-despised her for the unnecessary prodigality of everything she owned—from thick-bottomed saucepans to cashmere blankets. Money to burn, thought Mabs. Tucker would provide her with logs in winter and manure in summer: she’s the kind who never checks the price. A commission would come Mabs’ way from every tradesman she recommended. Liffey would be a useful source of income.

‘Roof needs re-doing,’ said Mabs. ‘The thatch is dried out: it becomes a real fire-risk, not to mention the insects! I’ve a cousin who’s a thatcher. He’s booked up for years but I’ll have a word with him. He owes me a favour.’

‘I’m not certain we’ll be able to stay,’ said Liffey sadly, and Mabs was alerted to danger. She saw Liffey as an ideal neighbour, controllable and malleable.

‘Why not?’ she asked.

Public tears stood in Liffey’s eyes at last, as they had not done for years. She could not help herself. The strain of moving house, imposing her will, acknowledging difficulty, and conceiving deceit, was too much for her. Mabs put a solid arm round Liffey’s small shoulders, and asked what the matter was. It was more than she ever did for her children. Liffey explained the difficulty over the train timetable.

‘He’ll just have to stay up in London all week and come back home weekends. Lots of them round here do that,’ said Mabs.

Liffey had not spent a single night apart from Richard since the day she married him, and was proud of her record. She said as much, and Mabs felt a stab of annoyance, but it did not show on her face, and Liffey continued to feel trusting. ‘Lots of wives would say that cramped their style,’ said Mabs.

‘Not me,’ said Liffey. ‘I’m not that sort of person at all. I’m a one-woman man. I mean to stay faithful to Richard all my life. Marriage is for better or worse, isn’t it.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mabs, politely. ‘Let’s hope your Richard feels the same.’

‘Of course he does,’ said Liffey stoutly. ‘I know accidents can happen. People get drunk and don’t know what they’re doing. But he’d never be unfaithful; not properly unfaithful. And nor would I, ever, ever, ever.’

Mabs spent a busy morning. She went up to her mother and begged a small jar of oil of mistletoe and a few drops of the special potion, the ingredients of which her mother would never disclose, and went home and baked some scones, and took them up to Liffey as a neighbourly gesture and when Tucker came home to his midday meal told him to get up to Liffey as soon as possible.

‘What for?’ asked Tucker.

‘You know what for,’ said Mabs. She was grim and excited all at once. Liffey was to be proved a slut, like any other. Tucker was to do it, and at Mabs’ behest, rather than on his own initiative, sometime later.

‘You know you don’t really want me to,’ said Tucker, alarmed, but excited too.

‘I don’t want her going back to London and leaving that cottage empty for Dick Hubbard to sell,’ said Mabs, searching for reasons. ‘And I want her side of the field for grazing, and I want her taken down a peg or two, so you get up there, Tucker.’

‘Supposing she makes trouble,’ said Tucker. ‘Supposing she’s difficult.’

‘She won’t be,’ said Mabs, ‘but if she is bring her down for a cup of coffee so we all get to know each other better.’

‘You won’t put anything in her coffee,’ said Tucker, suspiciously. ‘I’m a good enough man without, aren’t I?’ Mabs looked him up and down. He was small but he was wiry; the muscles stood out on his wrists: his mouth was sensuous and his nostrils flared.

‘You’re good enough without,’ she said. But in Mabs’ world men were managed, not relied upon, and were seldom told more than partial truths. And women were to be controlled, especially young women who might cause trouble, living on the borders of the land, and a channel made through them, the better to do it. Tucker, her implement, would make the channel.

‘I’ll go this evening,’ he said, delaying for no more reason than that he was busy hedging in the afternoon, and although he was annoyed, he stuck to it.

Liffey ate Mabs’ scones for lunch. They were very heavy, and gave her indigestion.

A little black cat wandered into the kitchen, during the afternoon. Liffey knew she was female. She rubbed her back against Liffey’s leg, and meowed, and looked subjugated, tender and grateful all at once. She rolled over on her back and yowled. She wanted a mate. Liffey had no doubt of it: she recognised something of herself in the cat, which was hardly more than a kitten and too young to safely have kittens of her own. Liffey gave her milk and tinned salmon. During the afternoon the cat sat in the garden and toms gathered in the bushes and set up their yearning yowls, and Liffey felt so involved and embarrassed that she went and lay down on her mattress on the floor, which was the only bed she had, and her own breath came in short, quick gasps, and she stretched her arms and knew she wanted something, someone, and assumed it was Richard, the only lover she had ever had, or ever—until that moment—hoped to have. Gradually the excitement, if that was what it was, died. The little cat came in; she seemed in pain. She complained, she rolled about, she seemed talkative and pleased with herself.

Farmyards, thought Liffey. Surely human beings are more than farmyard animals? Don’t we have poetry, and paintings, and great civilisations and history? Or is it only men who have these things? Not women. She felt, for the first time in her life, at the mercy of her body.

Richard, four hours late at the office, had to fit his morning’s work into the afternoon, remake appointments, and rearrange meetings. It became obvious that he would have to work late. His anger with Liffey was extreme: he felt no remorse for having hit her. Wherever he looked, whatever he remembered, he found justification for himself in her bad behaviour. Old injuries, old traumas, made themselves disturbingly felt. At fifteen, he had struck his father for upsetting his mother: he felt again the same sense of rage, churned up with love, and the undercurrent of sadistic power, and the terrible knowledge of victory won. And once his mother had sent off the wrong forms at the wrong time and Richard had failed as a result to get a university place. Or so he chose to think, blaming his mother for not making his path through life smooth, recognising the hostility behind the deed, as now he blamed Liffey, recognising her antagonism towards his work. It was as if during the angry drive to the office a trapdoor had opened up, which hitherto had divided his conscious, kindly, careful self from the tumult, anger and confusion below, and the silt and sludge now surged up to overwhelm him. He asked Miss Martin to send a telegram to Liffey saying he would not be home that night.

Miss Martin raised her eyes to his for the first time. They were calm, shrewd, gentle eyes. Miss Martin would never have misread a train timetable.

‘Oh Mr Lee-Fox,’ said Miss Martin. ‘You have got yourself into a pickle!’

Farmyards

Mabs’ children came home on the school bus. Other children wore orange armbands, provided by the school in the interests of road safety. But not Mabs’ children. ‘I’m not sewing those things on. If they’re daft enough to get run over they’re better dead. Isn’t that so, Tucker?’

Today the children carried a telegram for Liffey. Mrs Harris, who ran the sub post-office in Crossley had asked them to take it up to Honeycomb Cottage. They gave it instead to Mabs, who steamed the enevelope open, and read the contents, more for confirmation than information, for Mrs Harris had told the children, who told Mabs, that Richard would not be coming home that night. He was staying with Bella, instead.

Bella? Who was Bella? Sister, mistress, friend?

Tucker consented to take the telegram up to Liffey. No sooner had he gone than Mabs began to wish he had stayed. She became irritable, and gave the children a hard time along with their tea. She chivvied Audrey into burning the bacon, slapped Eddie for picking up the burnt bits with his fingers, made Kevin eat the half-cooked fatty bits so that he was sick, and then made Debbie and Tracy wipe Kevin’s sick up. But it was done: they were fed. All were already having trouble with their digestions, and would for the rest of their lives.

When Mabs was pregnant she was kinder and slower, but Kevin, the youngest, was four, and had never known her at her best. He was the most depressed, but least confused.

Liffey, wearing rubber gloves and dark glasses as well as four woollies, opened the door to Tucker. She knew from his demeanour that he had not come to deliver telegrams, or to mend fuses (although he did this for her, later) but to bed her if he could. The possibility that he might, the intention that he should, hung in the air between them. He did not touch her, yet the glands on either side of her vaginal entrance responded to sexual stimulation—as such glands do, without so much as a touch or a caress being needed—by a dramatic increase in their secretions.

Like the little black cat on heat, thought Liffey. Horrible! She made no connection between her response and Mabs’ scones, with their dose of mistletoe and something else. How could she?

I am not a nice girl at all, thought Liffey. No. All that is required of me is the time, the place, and the opportunity: a willing stranger at the door unlikely to reproach me; and dreams of fidelity and notions of virtue and prospects of permanence fly out the window as he steps in the door.

Love is the packet, thought Liffey, that lust is sent in, and the ribbons are quickly untied.

If I step back, thought Liffey, this man will step in after me and that will be that.

Come in, come in, Liffey’s whole body sang, but a voice from Madge answered back, ‘Wanting is not doing, Liffey. Almost nothing you can’t do without.’

Liffey did not step back. She did not smile at Tucker. But her breath came rapidly.

Tucker introduced himself. Farmer, Neighbour. Mabs’ husband. Owner of the field where the black and white cows grazed. Kicker of puffballs. Liffey remembered him now, by his steel-capped boots. She remained formal, and friendly. But Tucker knew, and knew that she knew, what there could be, was to be, between them.

Tucker handed over the telegram.

‘My husband can’t get back this evening,’ said Liffey, brightly and briskly, reading it. She knew better than to betray emotion at such a time. But she minded very much.

A fighter plane zoomed over the Tor, startling both, and was gone. Tucker Pierce smiled at Liffey. Liffey’s eyelids drooped as other parts of her contracted, in automatic beat. Oh, little black cat, squirming over the cool ground, the better to put out the fire within! Tucker moved closer. Liffey stood her ground, chanting an inner incantation, of nonsense and aspiration mixed. Richard, I love you, Richard, I am spirit, not animal: Tucker, in the name of love, in the name of God, in the name of Richard, flawed and imperfect as he is; Tucker, stay where you are.

Tucker stayed; Tucker talked, still on the step.

‘Come the spring,’ said Tucker, ‘you’ll be wanting our cows in your field. Keep the grass and the thistles down.’ ‘Not to mention the docks,’ said Tucker. ‘Docks can be a terrible nuisance.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ said Tucker. ‘We’re neighbours, after all.’

‘Any little bits and pieces you need doing,’ said Tucker. ‘Just ask.’

‘Looks cosy in there,’ said Tucker, peering over Liffey’s shoulder into the colourful warmth within. ‘I see you’ve a way with rooms: making them look nice, feminine like.’

And indeed Liffey had: tacking up a piece of fabric here, a bunch of dried flowers there. She adorned rooms as she hesitated to adorn herself. She loved silks and velvets and rich embroideries and plump cushions and old, faded colours.

Tucker looked longingly within. Liffey stood her ground. ‘Come on down to the farm,’ said Tucker, remembering Mabs’ instructions, ‘and have a cup of coffee with Mabs.’ ‘Mabs is always glad of company,’ lied Tucker. ‘One thing to be on your own when you expect it,’ observed Tucker, with truth. ‘Quite another when you don’t. You’ll be feeling lonely, I dare say.’

‘Not really,’ said Liffey, with as much conviction as she could muster. ‘But I’d be glad to use your telephone, if I could.’

They walked down together, along the rutted track. Tucker Pierce, farmer, married, father of five, muddy-booted, dirty-handed, coarse-featured, but smiling, confident and easy, secure in his rights and expectations. And little Liffey, feeling vulnerable and flimsy, a pawn on someone else’s chessboard, not the Queen. She saw herself through Tucker’s eyes. She saw that her frayed jeans could represent poverty as well as universal brotherhood, and skinniness malnutrition, rather than the calculated reward of a high protein, low calorie diet.

Liffey had to run to keep up with Tucker. Her country shoes, so absurdly stout in London, appeared flimsy here, while his clumsy boots moved easily over the hollows and chasms of the rutted path.

‘It’s quiet up here,’ said Tucker, turning to her.

Not here, she thought, not here in the open, like an animal: and then, not here, not anywhere, never!

Liffey rang Richard’s office from the cold hall of Cadbury Farm. Miss Martin said Richard was not available, having gone to a meeting at an outside advertising agency, and she did not expect him back.

‘Didn’t he leave a message?’

‘No.’

Liffey rang Bella and the au pair girl Helga answered.

Bella and Ray were dining out, with Mr Lee-Fox. Perhaps if Liffey rang later? At midnight?

‘No. It wouldn’t be practical,’ said Liffey.

‘Any message?’

‘No,’ said Liffey.

‘You do look cold,’ said Mabs. ‘Pull a chair to the fire.’ And she poured Liffey some coffee, in a cracked cup. The coffee was bitter.

Mabs chatted about the children, and schools, and cows and smoking chimneys. Tucker said nothing. The kitchen was large, stone flagged, handsome and cold. The same pieces of furniture—substantial rather than gracious—had stood here for generations—dresser, tables, sideboards, chairs—and were half-despised, half-admired by virtue of their very age. Tucker and Mabs boasted of the price they would fetch in the auction room, while using the table, almost on purpose, to mend sharp or oily pieces of farm machinery, and the edge of the dresser for whittling knives, and covering every available surface with the bric-a-brac of everyday life—receipts, bills, brochures, lists, padlocks, beads, hair rollers, badges, lengths of string, plastic bags, scrawled addresses, children’s socks and toys, plasters, schoolbooks, and tubes of this and pots of that. Neither Mabs nor Tucker, thought Liffey, marvelling, were the sort to throw anything away, and had the grace to feel ashamed of herself for being the sort of person who threw out a cup when it was chipped, or a dress when she was tired of it, or furniture when it bored her.

Cadbury Farm, she saw, served as the background to Tucker and Mabs’ life, it was not, as she was already making out of Honeycomb Cottage, a part, almost the purpose, of life itself.

Liffey went home as soon as she politely could.

‘It’s getting dark,’ said Mabs. ‘Tucker had better go with you. I’m not saying there’s a headless horseman out there, but you might meet a flying saucer. People do, round here. Mostly on their way home from the pub, of course. All the same, Tucker’ll take you. Won’t you, Tucker?’

‘That’s right,’ said Tucker.

But Liffey insisted on going by herself, and then felt frightened and wished Tucker was indeed with her, whatever the cost, particularly at that bend of the road where the wet branches seemed unnaturally still, as if waiting for something sudden and dreadful to happen. But she hurried on, and pulled the pretty curtains closed when she got to the cottage, and switched on the radio, and soon was feeling better again, or at any rate not frightened; merely angry with Richard and upset by her own feelings towards Tucker, and fearful of some kind of change in herself, which she could hardly understand, but knew was happening, and had its roots in the realisation that she was not the nice, good, kind, pivotal person she had believed, around whom the rest of an imperfect creation revolved, but someone much like anyone else, as nice and as good as circumstance would allow, but not a whit more: and certainly no better than anyone else at judging the rightness or wrongness of her own actions.

Desire for Richard overwhelmed her when she lay down to sleep on the mattress on the floor. It was, for Liffey, an unusual and physical desire for the actual cut and thrust of sexual activity, rather than the emotional need for tenderness and recognition and the celebration of good things which Liffey was accustomed to interpreting as desire, for lack of a better word. Presently images of Tucker replaced images of Richard, and Liffey rose and took a sleeping pill, thinking this might help her. All it did was to seem to paralyse her limbs whilst agitating her mind still more; and a sense of the blackness and loneliness outside began to oppress her, and an image of a headless horseman to haunt her, and she wondered whether choosing to live in the country had been an act of madness, not sanity, and presently rose and took another sleeping pill, and then fell into a fitful sleep, in which Tucker loomed large and erect.

But she had locked the door. So much morality, prudence, and the habit of virtue enabled her to do.

In Residence

At the time that Liffey was taking her second sleeping pill Bella offered one to Richard. Bella sat on the end of his bed, which Helga the au pair had made up out of a sofa in Bella’s study. Bella wore her glasses and looked intelligent and academic, and as if she knew what she was talking about. Her legs were hairy beneath fine nylon. Richard declined the pill.

‘Liffey doesn’t believe in pills,’ he said.

‘You aren’t Liffey,’ said Bella, firmly.

Richard considered this.

‘I decide what we do,’ said Richard, ‘but I let Liffey decide what’s good for us. And taking sleeping pills isn’t, except in extreme circumstances, and by mutual decision.’ ‘Liffey isn’t here,’ Bella pointed out. ‘And it was she who decided you’d live in the country, not you.’

It was true. Liffey had edged over, suddenly and swiftly, if unconsciously, into Richard’s side of the marriage, breaking unwritten laws.

‘You don’t think Liffey misread the timetable on purpose?’ He was on the downward slopes of the mountain of despondency, enjoying the easy run down: resentments and realisations and justifications rattled along at his heels, and he welcomed them. He wanted Bella to say yes, Liffey was not only in the wrong, but wilfully in the wrong.

‘On purpose might be too strong,’ said Bella. ‘Try by accident on purpose.’

‘It’s unfair of her,’ said Richard. ‘I’ve always tried to make her happy, I really have, Bella. I’ve taken being a husband very seriously.’

‘Bully for you,’ said Bella, settling in cosily at the end of the bed, digging bony buttocks in.

‘But one expects a return. Is that unreasonable?’

‘Never say one,’ said Bella. ‘Say “I”. “One” is a class-based concept, used to justify any amount of bad behaviour.’

‘Very well,’ said Richard. ‘I expect a return. And the truth is, Liffey has shown that she doesn’t care for my comfort and convenience, only for her own. And when I look into my heart, where there used to be a kind of warm round centre, which was love for Liffey, there’s now a cold hard patch. No love for Liffey. It’s very upsetting, Bella.’

He felt that Bella had him on a pin, was a curious investigator of his painful flutterings. But it was not altogether unpleasant. A world which had been black and white was now transfused with colour: rich butterfly wings, torn but powerful, rose and fell, and rose again. To be free from love was to be free indeed.

Bella laughed.

‘Happiness! Love!’ she marvelled. ‘Years since I heard anyone talking like that. What do you mean? Neurotic need? Romantic fantasy?’

‘Something’s lost,’ he persisted. ‘Call it what you like. I’m a very simple person, Bella.’

Simple, he said. Physical, of course, was what he meant. Able to give and take pleasure, and in particular sexual pleasure. Difficult, now, not to take a marked sexual interest in Bella; she, clothed and cosy on his bed, and he, naked in it, and only the thickeness of a quilt between them. Or if not a sexual interest, certainly a feeling that the natural, ordinary thing to do was to take her in his arms so that their conversation could continue on its real level, which was without words. The very intimacy of their present situation deserved this resolution.

These feelings, more to do with a proper sense of what present circumstances required than anything more permanent, Richard interpreted both as evidence of his loss of love for Liffey, and desire for Bella, and the one reinforced the other. That, and the shock of the morning, and the evidence of Liffey’s selfishness, and the sudden fear that she was not what she seemed, and the shame of his striking her, and the exhaustion of the drive, and the stirring up of childhood griefs, had all combined to trigger off in Richard’s mind such a wave of fears and resentments and irrational beliefs as would stay with him for some time. And in the manner of spouses everywhere, he blamed his partner for his misfortunes, and held Liffey responsible for the cold patch in his heart, and the uncomfortably angry and anxious, lively and lustful thoughts in his mind: and if he did not love her any more, why then, it was Liffey’s fault that he did not.

‘All I can say,’ said Bella, ‘is that love or the lack of it is made responsible for a lot of bad behaviour everywhere; and it’s hard luck on wives if misreading a train timetable can herald the end of a marriage: but I will say on your behalf, Richard, that Liffey is very manipulative, and has an emotional and sexual age of twelve, and a rather spoilt twelve at that. You’ll just have to put your foot down and move back to London, and if Liffey wants to stay where she is, then you can visit her at weekends.’ ‘She wouldn’t like that,’ said Richard. ‘You might,’ said Bella. ‘What about you?’

Spoilt. It was a word heard frequently in Richard’s childhood.

You can’t have this: you can’t have that. You don’t want to be spoilt. Or, from his mother, I’d like you to have this but your father doesn’t want me to spoil you. So you can’t have it. It seemed to Richard, hearing Bella say ‘spoilt’ that Liffey had been the recipient of all the good things he himself had ever been denied, and he resented it, and the word, as words will, added fuel to his paranoic fire, and it burned the more splendidly.

As for Bella—who had thrown in the word half on purpose, knowing what combustible material it was—Bella knew she herself was not spoilt, and never had been. Bella had been obliged to struggle and work for what she now had, as Liffey had not, and no one had ever helped her, so why should it be different for anyone else?

Richard sat up in bed. His chest was young, broad and strong. The hairs upon it were soft and sleek, and not at all like Ray’s hairy tangle.

‘I wish I could imagine Liffey and you in bed together,’ said Bella. ‘But I can’t. Does she know what to do? Nymphet Liffey!’

Bella had gone too far: approached too quickly and too near, scratched Liffey’s image which was Richard’s alone to scratch. Whatever was in the air between herself and Richard evaporated. Bella went back to her desk, typing, and Richard lay back and closed his eyes.

The wind rose in the night: two sleeping pills could not wipe out the sound or ease the sense of danger. Liffey heard a tile fly off the roof: occasionally rain spattered against the window. She lay awake in a sleeping bag on a mattress on the floor. The double bed was still stacked in two pieces against the wall. Liffey ached, body and soul.

Liffey got up at three and went downstairs and doused the fire. Perhaps the chimneys had not been swept for years and so might catch light. Then she would surely burn to death. Smoke belched out into the room as the hot coals received the water. Liffey feared she might suffocate, but was too frightened to open the back door, for by letting out the smoke she would let the night in. When she went upstairs the night had become light and bright again; the moon was large: the Tor was framed against pale clouds, beautiful. Liffey slept, finally, and dreamt Tucker was making love to her on a beach, and waves crashed and roared and stormed and threatened her, so there was only desire, no fulfilment.

When she woke someone was hammering on the front door. It was morning. She crawled out of the sleeping bag, put on her coat, went downstairs and opened the door. It was Tucker. Liffey stepped back.

Tucker stepped inside.

Tucker was wearing his boots, over-trousers tucked into them, a torn shirt, baggy army sweater, and army combat-jacket. His hands were muddy. She did not get as far as his face.

‘Came up to see if you were all right,’ said Tucker.

‘I’m fine,’ said Liffey. She felt faint: surely because she had got up so suddenly. She leaned against the wall, heavy-lidded. She remembered her dream.

‘You don’t look it,’ said Tucker. He took her arm; she trembled.

‘How about a cup of tea?’ said Tucker. He sat squarely at the kitchen table, and waited. His house, his land, his servant. Liffey found the Earl Grey with some difficulty. Richard and she rarely drank tea.

‘It’s very weak,’ said Tucker, staring into his cup. She had not been able to find a saucer and was embarrassed.

‘It’s that kind of tea,’ said Liffey.

‘Too bad Hubby didn’t come home,’ said Tucker. ‘I wouldn’t miss coming home to you. Do you like this tea?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t,’ said Tucker. He stood up and came over to stand behind her, pinioning her arms. ‘You shouldn’t make tea like that. No one should.’

His breath came warm and familiar against her face. She did not doubt but that the business of the dream would be finished. His arms, narrowing her shoulders, were so strong there was no point in resisting them. It was his decision, not hers. She was absolved from responsibility. There was a sense of bargain in the air: not of mutual pleasure, but of his taking, her consenting. In return for her consent he offered protection from darkness, storm and fire. This is country love, thought Liffey. Richard’s is a city love: Richard’s arms are soft and coaxing, not insistent: Richard strikes a different bargain: mind calls to mind, word evolves word, response evokes response, is nothing to do with the relationship between the strong and the weak, as she was weak now, and Tucker strong upon her, upon the stone floor, her coat fortunately between her bare skin and its cold rough surface, his clothing chafing and hurting her. Tucker was powerful, she was not: here was opposite calling to opposite, rough to smooth, hard to soft, cruel to kind—as if each quality craved the dilution of its opposite, and out of the struggle to achieve it crested something new. This is the way the human race multiplies, thought Liffey, satisfied. Tucker’s way, not Richard’s way.

But Liffey’s mind, switched off as a pilot might switch off manual control in favour of automatic, cut back in again once the decision of abandonment had been made. Prudence returned, too late. This indeed, thought Liffey, is the way the human race multiples, and beat upon Tucker with helpless, hopeless fists.

It was the last day of her period. Surely she could not become pregnant at such a time? But since she had stopped taking the pill her cycle was erratic and random: what happened hardly deserved the name of ‘period’: she bled for six days at uneven intervals, that was all. Who was to say what was happening in her insides? No, surely, surely, it would be all right, must be all right; even if it wasn’t all right, she would have a termination. Richard would never know: no one would ever know.

She was worrying about nothing: worrying even as she cried out again in pleasure, or was it pain: Tucker now behind her, she on her side, held fast in his arms. They were like animals: she had not cared: now she began to: she wanted Richard. Where was Richard? If he hadn’t missed his train none of this would have happened. Richard’s fault. It could not happen again: it must not happen again: she would have to make clear to Tucker it would not happen again: so long as he understood what she was saying, peasant that he was. Even as she began to be horrified of him he finished, and whether she was satisfied or not she could not be sure. She thought so. It was certainly a matter of indifference to Tucker. He returned to the table and his cold tea. He wanted the pot filled up with boiling water. She obliged in silence, and poured more.

‘I suppose you could develop a taste for it,’ he said. ‘But I’d better be getting back to Mabs.’

He left. Liffey went back to bed, and to sleep, and the sleeping pills caught up with her and it was two in the afternoon before she woke again, and when she did, the dream of Tucker and the actuality of Tucker were confused. Had it not been for the state of her nightshirt and the grazing on her legs and the patches of abraded roughness round her mouth, she would have dismissed the experience altogether as the kind of dream a woman dreams when she sleeps alone for the first time in years. But she could not quite do that.

Liffey balanced the incident in her mind against Richard’s scuffling with his secretary at the office party, and decided that the balance of fidelity had been restored. There was no need to feel guilty. At the same time there was every reason not to let it happen again. She had the feeling Tucker would not return, at any rate not in the same way. He had marked her, that was all, and put her in her proper place. She felt sure she could rely upon his discretion. She was even relieved. Now that Richard had been paid out, she could settle down to loving him again. She felt she had perhaps been angrier with him than she had thought.

‘Well?’ enquired Mabs, when Tucker returned. The children were off on the school bus. Eddie had a bruise on his back. She had given him a note to take to his teacher saying he had a sore foot and could he be excused physical training, which was done in singlet and pants.

‘Skinny,’ complained Tucker. ‘Nothing to it.’

She pulled him down on top of her, to take the taste of Liffey out of him as soon as possible.

‘Not like you,’ said Tucker. ‘Nothing’s like you.’

‘But we’ll get the cows in her field,’ Mabs comforted herself.

‘We’ll get whatever we want,’ said Tucker. He felt the distress in her and kissed her dangerous eyes closed, in case the distress should turn to anger, and sear them all. ‘She’s just a little slut,’ said Mabs. ‘I knew she was from the way she talked. Don’t you go near her again, Tucker, or I’ll kill you.’

He thought he wouldn’t, because she might.

If he’d been a cockerel, all the same, he’d have crowed.

Taking and leaving Liffey. He liked Liffey.

Mabs asked Carol, later, if she knew what it was her mother mixed in with the mistletoe, and Carol said no, she didn’t. But whatever it was, it had got her Dick Hubbard.

‘It’s not that I believe in any of mother’s foolery,’ said Carol, ‘any more than you do. It’s just that it works. At least to get things started. It would never get a river flowing uphill—but if there’s even so much as a gentle slope down, it sure as hell can start the flood.’

In Richard’s Life

Richard, taking Bella’s words to heart, if not her body to his, went round to the apartment before going to work, to explain to Mory and Helen that a mistake had been made, and that he and Liffey would have to return to London. Liffey, Richard had decided, would have to put up with using Honeycomb Cottage as a weekend retreat, and he would have to put up with her paying for its rent—not an unpleasant compromise for either of them—until his verbal contract with Dick Hubbard, to take the cottage for a year, could be said to have expired. ‘Never go back on a deal just because you can,’ Richard’s father had instructed him, ‘even if it’s convenient. A man’s word is his bond. It is the basis on which all civilisation is based.’ And Richard believed him, following the precept in his private life, if not noticeably on his employers’ behalf.

‘Never let a woman pay for herself,’ his mother had said, slipping him money when he was nine, so he could pay for her coffee, and confusion had edged the words deeply into his mind. ‘Never spend beyond your income,’ she would say, ‘I never do,’ when he knew it was not true.

Now he earnestly required Liffey to live within his income whilst turning a blind eye to the fact that they clearly did not: that avocados and strawberries and pigskin wallets belonged to the world of the senior executive, not the junior. The important thing, both realised, was to save face. She seriously took his housekeeping, and he seriously did not notice when it was all used upon one theatre outing.

It was difficult, Richard realised on the way up the stairs, to fulfil the obligation both to Dick Hubbard and to Mory, who had been promised a pleasant apartment and who now must be disappointed. It could not, in fact, be done; and for this dereliction Richard blamed Liffey. He resolved, however, out of loyalty to a wife whom he had gladly married, to say nothing of all this to Mory.

The familiar stairs reassured him; the familiar early morning smells of other people’s lives: laundry, bacon, coffee. The murmur of known voices. This was home. Three days away from it and already he was homesick. He could never feel the same for Honeycomb Cottage, although for Liffey’s sake he would have tried. Wet leaves, dank grass and a sullen sky he could persuade himself were seasonal things: but the running, erratic narrative of the apartment block would never be matched, for Richard, by the plodding, repetitive story of the seasons.

I am a creature of habit, said Richard to himself.

‘I am a creature of habit!’ Richard’s mother had been accustomed to saying, snuggling into her fur coat, or her feather cushion, eyes bright and winsome, when anyone had suggested she do something new—such as providing a dish on Tuesday other than shepherd’s pie, or getting up early enough in the morning to prepare a packed lunch for Richard, or going somewhere on holiday other than Alassio, Italy. ‘I am a creature of habit!’ Perhaps, Richard thought now, one day I will understand my mother, and the sense of confusion will leave me.

Richard knocked on his own front door. Helen’s sister Lally, pregnant body wrapped in her boyfriend’s donkey-jacket, opened the door. She wore no shoes. Richard, startled, asked to see Mory or Helen.

‘They’re asleep,’ said Lally. ‘Go away and come back later whoever you are,’ and she shut the door in his face. She was very pretty and generally fêted, and saw no need to be pleasant to strange men. She believed, moreover, that women were far too likely for their own good to defer to men, and was trying to stamp out any such tendency in herself, thus allying, most powerfully, principle to personality.

Richard hammered on the door.

‘This is my home!’ he cried. ‘I live here.’

Eventually Mory opened the door. Richard had not seen Mory for three months. Then he had worn a suit and tie and his hair cleared his collar. Now, pulling on jeans, hopping from foot to foot, hairy chested, long haired, he revealed himself as what Richard’s mother would describe as a hippie. ‘Don’t lose your cool, man,’ said Mory. ‘What’s the hassle?’

‘Is that really you?’ asked Richard, confused more by the hostility in look and tone, than by the change in Mory’s appearance, marked though it was.

‘So far as I know,’ said Mory, cunningly.

He did not ask Richard in. On the contrary, he now quite definitely blocked the door, and Richard, who had just now seen himself as a knight errant, was conscious of a number of shadowy, barefoot creatures within, and knew that his castle had been besieged, and taken and was full of alien people, and that only force of arms would win it back.

Richard explained. He was cautious and formal.

‘That’s certainly shitsville, man,’ said Mory, ‘but it was on your say-so we split, and our pad’s gone now, and what are we supposed to do, sleep on the streets to save you a train journey? Didn’t you see Lally was pregnant?’ Richard said he would go to law.

Mory said Richard was welcome to go to law, and in three years time Richard might manage an eviction.

‘We’ve got the law tied up, man,’ said Mory. ‘It’s on the side of the people, now. You rich bastards are just going to have to squeal.’

Mory’s language had changed, along with his temperament. Richard remarked on it to Miss Martin, when he reached the office. He was already on the phone to his solicitor.

‘He may have been popping acid,’ remarked Miss Martin. ‘Or he may have been like that all the time. People’s true natures reveal themselves when it comes to accommodation. It’s the territorial imperative.’

The solicitor sighed and sounded serious, and said Richard should come round at once.

Richard drove up to Honeycomb Cottage at eight that evening. He parked the car carefully on hard ground, in spite of his apparent exhaustion. He covered the bonnet with newspaper before he came in to the house. He did not mean to risk the car not starting in the morning. Liffey waved happily from the window. Last night’s nightmares and suspicions, and the morning’s bizarre event, were equally washed away in expectation, excitement and a sense of achievement. She had worked hard all day, unpacking, putting up curtains, lining shelves, chopping wood: reviving last night’s uneaten sweet-and-sour-pork in the coal-fired Aga which, now it had stopped smoking, she knew she was going to love. She had the hot water system working and the bed assembled. She had bathed and put on fresh dungarees, and washed her nightshirt.

Richard was not smiling as he came in the room. He sank in a chair. She poured him whisky, into a warmed glass.

That way the full flavour emerged.

He was silent!

‘Haven’t I worked hard? Do say I’ve done well. You’ve no idea how I missed you. There was such a wind, I was quite frightened in the night.’

Still he did not speak. Hearing her own voice in the silence she knew it was the voice of a child, playing bravely alone in its lighted bedroom, dark corridors between it and parents: making up stories, speaking aloud, filling up space, taking first one rôle, and then the other. Mournful, frightened prattle.

‘Did you really stay with Bella?’ She heard her own voice growing up, growing sour. No, she begged, don’t let me.

But she did.

‘Why didn’t you drive back last night? You must have known I’d be miserable on my own.’

Still silence.

‘And you hit me.’

‘Do shut up, Liffey,’ said Richard, in a conversational and uncondemning voice, thus enabling her to do so. ‘What’s for supper?’

She fetched out the sweet-and-sour-pork. She lit the candles. They ate. It was almost what she had dreamed, except that Richard hardly said a word.

‘We are in a mess,’ said Richard over the devilled sardines she had prepared in place of dessert. She could see that getting to the shops would be difficult. She would have to get a telephone installed as soon as possible, if only in order to call taxis.

‘We’re not,’ said Liffey, ‘we’re here, aren’t we, and it’s lovely, and if you say we have to move back to London I won’t make any trouble. But I would like to stay.’

Did Liffey have Tucker in mind as she spoke? Opening up whole new universes of power, and passion; laying instinct bare.

‘We can’t move back to London,’ said Richard, and even as Liffey’s eyes lit up, said, ‘I’m going to have to stay up in London during the week, and come back at weekends.’

Liffey wept. Richard explained.

‘At least until we can get something sorted out with the lawyers,’ said Richard. ‘Three months or so, I imagine. I can stay with Ray and Bella, on their sofa. It won’t be very comfortable but I can manage.’

Did Richard have Bella in mind as he spoke, filling his black-and-white world with rich colours of cynicism and new knowledge.

How long since Liffey had really wept? Not, surely, during all the time she had been married to Richard. Tears had fallen from her eyes for the plight of the helpless, or for abused children, or forsaken wives, or for the tens of thousands swept away by floods in far-off places, but she had not wept for herself.

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