Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 Read online

  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 that 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 masked sexual interest in Bella —she clothed and cosy on his bed, and he naked in it, and only the thickness 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 paranoiac 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 and her 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, has 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 multiplies, and beat upon Tucker with helpless, hopeless fists.

  It was the last 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.”

  Life In Richard's

  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 junior. The important thing, both realised, was to save face. She seriously took his housekeeping money, 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 his 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 peoples’ 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 provide a dish on Tuesday other than shepherd’s pie, or get up early enough in the morning to prepare a packed lunch for Richard, or go 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 feted, 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 doo
r, 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.