Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 Read online

Page 8


  “I can manage,” said Liffey. “I have the manual and am quite good mechanically.”

  That was his cue to say she was quite good at other things too, but he didn’t, so she knew it was over for him too, and was, when it came to it, relieved.

  “My husband’s coming back soon,” she said boldly. “Stay and meet him properly,” which Tucker did, settling down in front of the Aga, easing off his working boots.

  “Rotovator’s no good for virgin land,” said Tucker. “You’d need a tractor, your side of the stream. Bad soil too. You’d be lucky to grow an onion. All right for cows but that’s about all.”

  Liffey was making mayonnaise. She squeezed in garlic.

  “Strong stuff for eggs,” commented Tucker. “Eggs are delicate.”

  It had not all been rough and powerful—no. His fingers had been hard and calloused, but his mouth had been soft and his tongue gentle.

  No, Liffey, no. Enough.

  Oh, lonely nights without Richard.

  Richard arrived at seven minutes past eight, looking forward to his weekend. He was loving, cheerful and eager, and loaded with good things. Ray and Bella lived around the corner from the Camden Town street market, and Richard had bought aubergines and peppers, celeriac and chicory, and olives from the Greek shop, green and black both, and feta cheese and pita bread, and whisky and a new kind of aperitif and good claret, and a joint of the best available lamb in all London.

  Richard had resolved not to tell Liffey about the film he had seen the previous night with Bella and Ray, and how they had all gone off to a new fish restaurant afterwards, on expenses, for Bella and Ray were writing the place up for the column, or about the fun they had had choosing the most expensive dishes on the menu, finding fault, and sending them back to the kitchen. The management had not seen it as fun, and Richard had wanted Liffey to be there so he could discuss the whole thing afterwards, but where was Liffey? At the end of a muddy lane, a hundred and more miles away, which she loved more than she loved him.

  Richard unloaded the good things on to the table, kissed Liffey, and was glad to see Tucker sitting there, since the presence of a stranger made the lie in his heart less likely to show in his eye.

  How quickly Liffey makes friends, thought Richard. At least he would not have to worry in case she were lonely, stuck away here by herself.

  “Tucker and Mabs have been so helpful,” said Liffey.

  “Until we get her driving, and get a telephone put in,” said Richard to Tucker, “we’re going to be dependent on your good services, I’m afraid. Sorry about the call the other night. Too much to drink.”

  “That’s what neighbours are for,” said Tucker.

  Liffey had the uncomfortable feeling that Richard was in some way shelving his responsibility towards her and handing it over to Tucker and Mabs.

  Tucker suggested they both go over to Mabs for a meal, and Richard accepted with what Liffey saw as unseemly alacrity. “But I’ve got supper waiting—” she began, but didn’t finish. She moved the meat from the fast to the slow oven. They could eat it tomorrow.

  Mabs saw the lights in the kitchen go out and knew they were on their way up, and determined that Liffey should have an uncomfortable weekend. She could in no way see that Liffey deserved Richard’s love as well as Tucker’s attentions. Those who must be up and doing, as was Mabs, have little time for those who are content just to be, as was Liffey. And the need to be pleasant to her for the sake of a pound here and fifty pence there and an acre of free grazing no longer seemed of pressing importance.

  Mabs served a lamb stew from an enormous pot on the cooker. Liffey was given the gristly bits.

  “Wonderful flavour!” marvelled Richard.

  “It’s because they’re home-grown,” said Liffey. “Everything here tastes wonderful.”

  “No time to grow vegetables,” said Tucker. “We do manage a drop or two of cider; come November you’d best be bringing your apples over for the pressing. You get quite a nice little crop off of some of your trees. No good for eating, mind. Not if you’ve got a sweet tooth.” And he grinned at Liffey, and Liffey wished he wouldn’t.

  Liffey was well into her menstrual cycle. Some twenty-five or so follicles ripened nicely in her ovaries, one ahead of the others. In a couple of days it would reach maturity, and drop, and put an end to the generative energies of the rest. Nature works by waste.

  There was apple pie and real cream for pudding, and afterwards Mabs handed round home-made Turkish Delight. She pressed the mint-flavoured piece on Liffey. Liffey didn’t think it was very nice.

  Liffey and Richard walked home down the lane. The night was crisp and clear. The moon had a chunk out of it.

  “Wonderful people,” said Richard. “Real people, country people.”

  “Those are my lines,” said Liffey.

  “With none of the false romanticism about the country you get from townfolk.”

  “Those are Bella’s lines,” said Liffey.

  They were too.

  Liffey was getting grumbling pains in her stomach. Her hand clenched Richard’s.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Pains.”

  “Ovulation pains?” asked Richard, knowledgeable.

  “No, not like that.”

  “What like, then?” He used the childish vocabulary that was their habit, and heard himself, and despised himself.

  “Indigestion. Perhaps it was the stew.”

  “Delicious stew. Why don’t you make stews, Liffey?”

  “Perhaps I will, now I’m in the country.”

  “We’re still going to have our baby, aren’t we?”

  “Of course!”

  Bella had said that having a baby might be the making of Liffey. Responsibility might mature her.

  “The Turkish Delight tasted peculiar,” said Liffey. “Why would a woman like Mabs make Turkish Delight?”

  Richard discovered that he was critical of his wife, that he jeered inwardly at her absurdities and felt the desire to mock what had once entranced him. He blamed Liffey for the loss of his love for her. Richard had been to bed with Bella.

  Full Moon

  Mabs stared at the moon. The moon stared at Mabs. Tucker couldn’t sleep.

  Other people looked at the moon.

  In Liffey and Richard’s former apartment Mory lay in bed in the moonlight while Helen tweezed hairs from her chin. He had a sharp, pale face and a straggly beard that jutted above the bedclothes.

  “No need to get uptight about anything,” said Helen comfortingly. She was plump, pretty, dark and hairy. She was a free-lance TV set designer, usually out of work. “Liffey has money to burn. They can afford to live anywhere. We certainly can’t.” -

  “I’m really hung up about Richard,” said Mory. “I can feel my ulcer again. What sort of friend is he, writing solicitors’ letters when he could just as well phone?”

  “And there’s Lally to think about,” said Helen.

  Lally, Helen’s sister, out-of-work model and eight months’ pregnant, lay on foam rubber in the room next door in the arms of Roy, out-of-work builder. If they married, her Social Security payments would cease. She was cold. She tossed and turned in the moonlight and presently decided the warmth was not worth the discomfort and told him to get the hell out of her bed and build a fire. “What with?” he asked.

  “With that,” she said and pointed at a Japanese bamboo screen of Liffey’s and a little wickerwork stool. “People before things,” she said.

  “He’s got it all ways,” observed Mrs. Martin, Richard’s secretary’s mother. She was a plump, busy little body, with a husband two years dead. She was ashamed of her widowhood, as if in letting her husband die she had committed a criminal offence—a feeling that the neighbours up and down the suburban street reinforced by ceasing to call where once they had called, or even going so far as to cross the road when she approached. That they might have acted thus from embarrassment or from a primitive fear that misfortune might be catchi
ng, and so could hardly be any more responsible for their reactions than she was for her husband’s death, Mrs. Martin failed to appreciate. She kept herself to herself, and studiously read the more profound of the women’s magazines, scanning the pages for truth and understanding about wifehood, mistresshood, motherhood, never quite knowing what she was looking for but feeling sure that one day she would find it; in the meantime she passed on to her daughter what she found about the ways of the world.

  “He’s got it all ways,” she said now. “Bachelor life all week and country cottage at the weekends. Trust a man.”

  “Oh no,” said Miss Martin. “It wasn’t his idea, it was her idea.”

  “He’ll be after you next,” said Mrs. Martin, “in that case. You be careful. Men always cheat on women who organise their lives.”

  “I’m not the type,” said Miss Martin, wishing she were. She felt cheated by life, which had taken away her father and turned her mother into someone whose advice was based on reading, not on experience. Mrs. Martin thought it unwise of her daughter not to sleep with her fiance, Jeff; but Miss Martin knew well enough that the only reason so handsome and eligible a young man as Jeff wanted to marry her was that all the other girls did and she didn’t. He was a Catholic and divided women, in the old-fashioned way, into good and bad. The good ones, Virgin Marys all, who had a man’s babies by as near to an immaculate conception as everyone could manage, and the bad ones, whom you loved, humiliated and left. Miss Martin saw all this quite clearly and still wanted to marry Jeff. Mrs. Martin also saw it clearly and didn’t want her daughter to marry Jeff: her advice was directed, if unconsciously, to this end.

  Their little white cat yowled to be let out. Miss Martin opened the back door and it darted out between her solid legs.

  “Why should Mr. Lee-Fox choose me?” she asked.

  “Because you’re there,” said her mother. “All a man needs is for a woman to be there.”

  Miss Martin’s boyfriend, Jeff, was on the Embankment doling out soup to vagrants and alcoholics. Once a week he did voluntary social work. “There but for the grace of God,” he’d say. He took girlie magazines in his briefcase to read in the early hours when the flow of mendicants and suppliants dried up. Tonight the moon was so bright that he did not need his torch, and a shimmering mystery was added to an otherwise brutal reality, and he was glad. He put his trust in Miss Martin’s virginity to cure him, in some magic way, of his unseemly lusts.

  Bella and Ray lay far apart in their big double bed. Bella thought of the love of her life, who had been married for five years to someone else, and Ray thought of his hopeless love for Karen, schoolgirl. Bella and Ray held hands across the gulf that separated them, and felt better.

  “Helga fancies Richard,” said Bella with satisfaction. Bella lived in fear of losing Helga, for if Helga went, so would her own freedom from domestic and maternal duties. Au-pairs were becoming hard to find and harder still to control. They demanded nights out, and lovers in their beds, and exorbitant wages. Helga had been showing signs of restlessness. A romantic interest in the house, in the form of Richard, would do much to keep her quiet and docile.

  “So long as you don’t,” said Ray, more out of marital politeness than any real anxiety.

  “Of course I don’t,” said Bella. “He’s much too simple for me.”

  The moon, shining through the Georgian window, making shadow bars across the bed, made her think she was in prison, which in turn made her feel she could yet be free.

  Helga, indifferent to a foreign moon, slept soundly in her boxroom. She worked hard, too hard: she was always tired. She was a warm, rounded, sleepy little thing, with busy hands, for ever cleaning and wiping and tidying. Sometimes she thought she would look for a new job with less work, but there was never time. And if she went home, who would look after the children? They needed her. Those who respond to others’ needs live hard lives and go unrewarded. She knew it but could do nothing about it.

  Mabs’s sister Carol, allegedly spending the night at Cadbury Farm, was in the back of Dick Hubbard’s car. Later they would go to his office in the market square, letting themselves in when the pubs had closed and there was, they wrongly believed, no one about to see. While they waited they indulged the passion that obsessed them both. It was true, the whole village agreed, that he was a better partner for her than her husband Barry, but she had made her choice, and the village said she should stick to it. Carol was lean and dark as Mabs was broad and pale. Her limbs were silvery in the moonlight, smooth and slippery as a fish seen under water.

  Dick Hubbard was worried because he had let Honeycomb Cottage when he should have sold and had allowed short-time interest to stand in the way of long-term benefit. He had recognised long ago that to act in this way was to doom himself to financial mediocrity. But still he let it happen.

  “She bought a Rotovator,” he complained now to Carol.

  “She’ll soon get tired of it,” said Carol comfortingly, “and the weeds will be back.”

  “She was even asking round for a builder.”

  “Then have a word with the builder. You can pay a builder a fortune and the chimney will still come through the roof. What’s the matter with you, Dick? Where’s your spirit?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The energy seems to have left my brain and gone down between my legs. I suppose that’s how you like it.”

  “I’ll supply enough brain for both of us,” said Carol. “You just supply the other.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Fox lay under the moon and worried about Richard. He was their only son.

  “Perhaps I brought him up wrong,” said Mrs. Lee-Fox.

  “You did the best you could. Every mother does.”

  It was their normal way of speaking—she agitating, he comforting. Now, in the middle of the night, it came like automatic speech.

  “He should never have married her.”

  “She’s a nice, bright girl. His choice.”

  “We’ll never have grandchildren.”

  “Give them time.”

  “Our lovely apartment. And they’ve let the squatters in!” “The law will get them out.”

  “All our savings went to get him started.”

  “And he is started,” said Mr. Lee-Fox. “That’s the way life goes. As his starts, ours closes in. We’re left with the pickings of his takings. Once it was the other way around. You did it to your parents, I did it to mine. Now it’s our turn.”

  “I don’t want it to be,” she said, as if he, like Superman, could turn the world the other way, but he just grunted and fell asleep. The moonlight cratered her skin as if it were the moon’s surface, so she looked fifty years older than the modest fifty-three she was.

  As for Liffey, the gripes in her stomach became worse. She spent the night groaning on the sofa or moaning on the lavatory seat. Liffey was not good at pain. Stoicism was her mother’s prerogative. Madge, even if stung by a wasp, would manage to clamp her teeth before the involuntary scream could be fully released. Liffey, similarly stung, would shriek and jump and fling her arms about, breaking dishes and spilling food, giving easy voice to pain, shock and indignation.

  Liffey was afraid of pain, as people often are who have endured little of it. She had never had a toothache, never broken a bone, and had spent a healthy youth, unplagued by unpleasant minor illness. She avoided emotional pain by pulling herself together when nasty or uncomfortable thoughts threatened, and diverting herself conscientiously if she felt depression setting in. It could not always be done, but she did her best. Liffey was afraid of childbirth because she knew it would hurt. How could it not, if so large an object as a baby was to leave so confined a space? And the cries and groans of women in childbirth was part of her filmic youth: yes, that was pain, PAIN. And Supposing the baby were born deformed? The fear would accompany her pregnancy, she knew it would. She could not say these things to Richard: women, though allowed to flinch at spiders and shudder at the thought of dirtying their hands, were exp
ected to face pregnancy and childbirth with equanimity. Nor could she expect sympathy from Madge, who would see it as further proof of her daughter’s errant femininity. And as for her friends—ah, her friends. Only a few days away, and she could scarcely remember their names or their faces. Liffey kept her fears to herself and let others believe her reluctance to have a baby was in the term of an older generation “selfish” and in those of her contemporaries “political”—namely, that she feared to lose her freedom and her figure and sink into the maternal swamp.

  Richard gave up waiting for Liffey to feel better and fell asleep at two-fifteen. He had had a long day. Up at seven, the strain of breakfast with friends, not family: then the office, a business lunch, a conference: then the long drive back to Liffey, then supper with the Pierces: and now poor Liffey groaning and clutching her stomach. He doubted whether he could have managed to make love to Liffey even had she been feeling well, even had her pains been due to ovulation and she at her most fertile.

  Richard slept. Liffey groaned.

  It was not until after three that a cloud covered the moon, or, as Tucker felt, that Mabs let the moon go, stopped staring, and slept.

  The cloud passed, the moon shone bright and firm again. In the morning, when the sun rose, it could still be seen as a pale disc low in the sky. Mabs waved to the disc as if to a friend, when she rose early to help with the cows. Lights flashed behind the Tor; she could not be sure why. She had noticed the phenomenon before.

  “Something’s going to happen,” she said to the moon, feeling a small excitement grow within her.

  Mabs cast an eye over to Honeycomb Cottage and noticed that no smoke rose from the chimney, and presumed, rightly, that the kitchen range had gone out and that Liffey had had a bad night after the Turkish Delight, and laughed.