Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 Page 9

  Good and Bad

  All the next day too Liffey moaned and groaned and shivered. The tiny bathroom was unheated, and there was no hot water, since the kitchen stove had gone out overnight.

  “Oh, Liffey”—Richard reproached his wife, gently enough, for she was a poor, weak, pale, shivery thing—“it’s one thing to live like this from necessity, but I can see no virtue in doing it from choice.”

  “It would be all right if everything was working smoothly,” said Liffey, but she hardly believed it herself any more. She could see Richard was being brave and trying hard not to complain and to enjoy what she enjoyed: and also she perceived that he never would, and never could, had had to accept that though they were one flesh, yet they were different people, and that one or the other would have to submit. And that she had.

  Richard cleared the flue with a broomstick and went up on the roof and extracted the matted twigs of jackdaws’ nests that blocked the chimney. In one of the nests he found silver foil, bottle tops and a piece of Woolworth’s jewellery, which he would have presented ceremoniously to Liffey, had she been in a fit state to receive it, or he, indeed, to give it. She was ill and he was dirty. He had to boil kettle after kettle of water before he could clean away the soot from his face and neck and the grime beneath his nails.

  “But I like you dirty,” said Liffey. “It’s natural.” She was wrapped up, warm and cosy, on the sofa and feeling a little better. She had been purged of her sin, her liaison with Tucker. “What has nature got to do with us?” he asked. “We’ve left the cave. Too late to go back.”

  Outside, the trees were gaunt and bare against the winter sky, and snow clouds massed grey and thick behind the Tor. That pulled one way, Richard the other.

  “Do you want to sell soup all the days of your life?” asked Liffey. “Live in an artificial world entirely?”

  “Yes, Liffey, I do. I want you to have babies and me to be their father, and that’s enough nature for me. I want to have light and heat at the touch of a button and never to have to clear a flue in all the rest of my life. I find the country sinister, Liffey.”

  It was an odd admission from him, who liked to deny the existence of anything that science could not properly understand. “That’s because you fight it,” said Liffey. Smoke puffed out of the chimney and made Richard cough, but swirled round Liffey, leaving her alone. Liffey deduced, wrongly, that nature was on her side. She was its pawn, perhaps, but scarcely an ally. Mabs could have told her that.

  “In the meantime,” said Richard, “we shall make the best of it, since we have to, and I will put up with being away from you during the week, and you will put up with being separated from me, and I promise not to look lustfully at anyone and you must do the same.”

  Now that Richard was with Liffey again he regretted his sexual lapse with Bella. It had happened while both were under the influence of drink, so much so that neither could (or at any rate had the excuse not to) remember the details the next day. Both had quickly resolved that it should not happen again, or Richard had. In the clear light of Liffey’s gaze he was happy enough that it should not.

  Both had agreed, on marriage, that sexual jealousy was a despicable emotion, and, while playing safe and pledging mutual fidelity, had taken it as a matter for congratulation that neither was a prey to it. That it might more reasonably be a matter for commiseration—inasmuch as neither offered the other so profound a sexual satisfaction as to make them fear the losing of it—did not occur to them.

  Nevertheless Liffey had certainly suffered a whole range of unpleasant emotions—disappointment, pique, humiliation, and so on—over what Richard now thought of as “The Office Party Episode,” and he did not wish her, or indeed him, to go through that again.

  And he regretted, even more than the physical infidelity, the more subtle betrayal of Liffey of which he was guilty—the discussion of her failing with others. Prying himself loose from her, as if he was the host and she the parasite, he had let in so much light and air that the close warm symbiosis between them could never quite be repaired. They had been one: he had, in self-defence, rendered them two.

  He could see, moreover, the threat to their happiness that their weekly separation entailed. He would see her, each weekend, more and more clearly. She, because she waited, would see what she expected. He, the one waited for, and for that reason the more powerful, would see reality. He feared that marital happiness lay in being so close to the partner that the vision was in fact blurred.

  But it was a situation she herself had brought about. He could not be responsible for it or suffer too much on account of it. It was comfortable and convenient at Bella’s, and exciting too, in a way he would rather not think about.

  “I’ll bring down paint and wallpaper next weekend,” said Richard. “We’ll make everything lovely.”

  “And guests,” said Liffey. “Friends! Perhaps Bella and Ray would come?”

  “They’re very busy,” said Richard. And they went through their friends and discovered that most would be too busy, or too frightened by discomfort, or too in need of crowds, or too quarrelsome, and in general too restless to make good guests.

  They made themselves think of Mory and Helen, although the subject upset them, and decided, or at any rate Liffey did, that Helen had fallen under the influence of her sister Lally, and that Mory was suffering from some kind of brainstorm consequent upon unemployment, and that it could not be concluded that there was anything disagreeable at all about the nature of human beings or the foibles of friends, It was, as it were, a one-off experience and should not embitter them. So said Liffey. Richard merely concluded in his heart that the business world and the personal world were pretty much the same after all. Everyone behaved as well as they could afford to, but not one whit better.

  “All the same,” said Liffey, “let’s just have you and me at weekends.” She suspected that was what Richard wanted, that after a week at the office and in Bella and Ray’s home, he would be glad of peace and solitude at weekends. And he thought that was what she really wanted, and was relieved.

  “Money isn’t important,” said Liffey a little later. “Money can’t buy love.”

  It was a favourite phrase and one that came easily to the lips of someone who had never gone short of it.

  Liffey’s fortune, although she did not know it, was in fact down to seventeen pounds eighty-four pence. The cheque made out for the Rotovator, at present passing through the central banking computer, albeit at its slow Sunday pace, would overdraw her account by five hundred and thirty pounds and eight pence. Three years ago Liffey had instructed her bank to sell stock at will in order to keep her current account in balance, and this they had dutifully done. There was no more stock to sell. A letter to this effect had been delivered to her London home on the very day she left for the country. Mory and Helen had neither the will nor the inclination to forward letters, and this one now lay behind an empty beer can on the mantelpiece.

  “If they want their mail,” said Lally, “let them come and get it. I don’t see why you should do them any favours!”

  The apartment, which once had been warm with the smell of baking and the scent of the honeysuckle Liffey had managed to grow in a pot on the windowsill, and sweet and decorous with the music of Dylan and Johann Sebastian Bach, was now a cold, hard, musty place, stripped of decoration echoing with righteous murmurings.

  “Richard needn’t think I’m going to pay him a penny rent,” said Mory. “Because I’m not. I’m not the kind of person other people can send solicitors’ letters to with impunity. I give as good as I get.”

  “It’s not even as if we could pay the rent,” said Helen, “as Richard knew perfectly well when he asked us in to caretake this dump of a place.”

  “He’s let this place run down,” said Lally’s builder boyfriend, pointing out a damp patch in the ceiling, the blocked bathroom basin overflow, and the flaking plaster under the stairs. He pulled at a hot-water pipe to demonstrate the rottenness of
the wall behind it, and the pipe broke in two, and it was some time before anyone could find the stop cock of the water main. “People who don’t look after places don’t deserve to have them,” he said, rolling another joint. He had given up building since meeting Lally. He referred to himself as Lally’s piece of rough.

  “I think Richard’s got a nerve,” said Helen the next day, pulling out the gas cooker to adjust a pipe so that the supply would by-pass the meter, “asking any rent at all for a place like this. Look at the wall behind the cooker. It’s thick with grease! Liffey needn’t think I’m going to clear up after her.”

  “It’s just a slum,” said Lally, feeding the fire with the remains of a bentwood rocker, “everything in it’s broken.” Liffey had left the chair, an original Thonet, under the stairs while she found a responsible caner to re-do the broken canework.

  “I say,” said Mory uneasily, “I think that might be rather a good chair you’ve been burning.”

  “It was broken,” said Lally. “Same as everything else in this dump.”

  “Possession is theft,” said her boyfriend, going to sleep.

  “All this antique junk,” said Helen. “I really used to dig that scene, didn’t I, Mory? Remember? Then I realised it was part of the nostalgia that keeps the human race dragging its feet. Chairs are things you sit in, not mementos to the past.”

  Mory said a little prayer, however, as the flames licked in and out the little bevelled squares of golden cane. Sometimes he wondered where the womenfolk were leading him—whether living by principle couldn’t go too far.

  During that weekend Mory and Helen took in a pregnant cat, who settled in the linen cupboard and had kittens in a nest of Victorian tablecloths. Helen loved the kittens. Lally had pains from time to time and thought she might be having the baby, but Helen looked up the Book of Symptoms and all decided she was not. They had given up doctors, who were an essential part of the male conspiracy against women, and were seeing Lally through her pregnancy themselves. At the very last moment, the plan was, they would dial 999 for an ambulance for Lally, who would then be taken to the nearest hospital too late for enemas, shaving, epidurals, and all the other ritual humiliations women in childbirth were subjected to, and simply give birth to the baby.

  “I suppose you nuts know what you’re doing,” said Lally’s builder boyfriend, whose name no one could remember but which in fact was Roy, whose father had been a hard-line Stalinist, and who was fighting—at least they hoped he was fighting —a severe indoctrination in authoritarianism.

  “There’s a positive correlation,” said Helen, “between the hospitalisation of mothers and infant mortality rates. We know what we’re doing all right.”

  Lally’s pains were quite severe.

  “That means it’s not labour,” said Helen. “It can’t be. You don’t have pains when you’re having a baby, you have contractions. All that stuff about pain is part of the myth. Having a baby is just a simple, natural thing.”

  Helen was excited by her new view of the Universe. Acidtripping for the first time, six months previously, at Lally’s instigation, had caused her radically to rethink her life and attitudes. If Lally showed signs of reneging, falling back into the accepted framework of society, Helen was there to prevent it.

  Lally’s pains stopped, and later she had diarrhoea and other symptoms of food poisoning, so Helen was vindicated. She put Lally on a water-only diet for two days. They clustered round the bamboo fire, which burned yellowly and brightly, and had a consciousness-raising session.

  Were they all to be made homeless by the whims of the likes of Richard and Liffey? No. Would they fight for the roof over their heads, fight individual landlords, fight the system that denied them their natural rights? Yes. Would they join the Claimants’ Union, just around the corner? Tomorrow! All went to bed invigorated, cheerful and fruitful.

  During Saturday night Liffey’s pains returned, and when Richard moved his hand on to her breast, speculatively, she pushed it gently away. Liffey was worried. She thought it might have something to do with Tucker. Perhaps the introjection of his body into hers, so foreign to it, had started up some sinister chain of reaction? She worried for Richard’s sake, in case something disagreeable of Tucker passed itself on to him, through her. It was nothing so crude as the fear of a venereal disease but of something more subtle—a general degeneration from what was higher to what was lower. Tucker was mire and swamp; Richard a clean, clear, grassy bank of repose. The mire lapped higher and higher. It was her fault.

  Richard let his hand lie: they drifted off to sleep. Richard, to his shame, dreamt of Bella and in the morning did not pursue his amorous inclination towards Liffey, but cleared damp leaves from the paths around the cottage, and missed his Sunday paper and the droney communal somnolence of the city Sabbath, and said nothing. The countryside did not soothe him. He felt it was not so much dreaming as waiting. Its silence, broken only by a few brave winter birds, made him conscious of the beating of his breast, the stream of his own blood, and his mortal vulnerability. He could not understand why Liffey loved it so.

  Mabs came over in the afternoon with home-made Mayflower wine for Richard—which she claimed was unlucky for women to imbibe—and a dark, rich, sweet elderberry wine to sooth Liffey’s insides.

  “I don’t know how you knew about my tummy,” said Liffey, gratefully sipping, and Richard wondered too how Mabs could know. Then they both forgot about it, as people will, when the penalty of unravelling truth is extreme.

  Mabs carried Richard’s wine in a brown carrier bag, and the bottle was, wrapped for safety in old magazines, which, inspected when Mabs left, turned out to be crudely pornographic.

  Liffey’s little nose crinkled in mirthful disgust.

  “Aren’t people funny!” she said, sipping the sweet elderberry wine, which indeed soothed her tummy and contained a drop or two of a foxglove potion with which Mabs’s mother had dosed her daughters in their early adolescence to keep them out of trouble. “The things they have to do to get turned on.”

  The thought came to Richard, after several glasses of the Mayflower wine, which was dry, clear and heady and contained the same mistletoe distillation that Carol put in Dick Hubbard’s brandy and soda, that Liffey had never in fact been properly turned on herself, that her love-making was altogether too light and loving and childish—a reflection, in fact, of herself-—and that though he loved and cherished her, in fact because he loved and cherished her, he could never through her discover what lay in himself. The thought was quite clear, quite dispassionate, and final.

  Richard put his arms round Liffey, but she moved away from him. Mayflower and elderberry do not mix—they belong to different seasons. They do not understand each other any more than do foxglove and mistletoe, the one of the earth, the other of the air.

  Carol was the next to call.

  “Well,” said Richard to Liffey, “at least you’ll never be lonely here.” He thought that Carol looked at him with direct invitation as she warned them not to spend too much on the house, as it would never be anything but damp, not to bother to try and grow vegetables, as the soil was poor, and to leave the roof alone, as it was so old that interference by builders would only make it worse.

  It seemed to Richard that what Carol was saying, in effect, was that time and money spent on things was wasted: energy should be preserved for sexual matters. That the highest good was the union of male and female, and had Liffey not been in the room, and some scraps of discretion left to him, he would most certainly have made a sexual advance towards her.

  Carol’s lips mouthed words about damp-courses, potatoes and thatch, but her eyes said “Come into me,” and he could feel the warmth of her body even across the room, and it seemed to him that all the ingenuities and activities of the human race, and all its institutions—state, church, army and bureaucracy—could be read as the merest posturing; diversion from the real preoccupation of mankind, the heady desire of the male to be into the female and the fem
ale to be entered by the male. He had another glass of Mayflower wine. Liffey looked at him anxiously. He was flushed.

  When Carol had gone he kissed Liffey chastely on the brow.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, puzzled.

  “I’m glad I married you,” he said.

  For those very qualities in Liffey that earlier in the day had seemed his undoing he could now see as God-given.

  Richard wanted Liffey to be the mother of his children. He wanted her for that reason to be separated out from the rest of humanity. He wanted her to be above that sexual morass in which he, as male, could find his proper place but she, as wife and mother, could not. He wanted her to be pure, to submit to his sexual advances rather than enjoy them, and thus, as a sacred vessel, sanctified by his love, adoration and respect, to deliver his children unsullied into the world. It was for this reason that he had offered her all his worldly goods, laying them down upon the altar of her purity, her sweet smile. And he wanted other women, low women, whom he could despise and enjoy, to define the limits of his depravity and his senses and thus explain the nature of his being and his place in the Universe.

  Richard wanted Bella. Richard wanted anyone, everyone.

  Except Liffey.

  Richard sat rooted in his chair.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Liffey, but he would not, could not speak, and presently said he would have to go back to London that night instead of the next morning, which upset her and made her cry but could not be helped. These cataclysmic truths had in some way to be properly registered in his mind through his actions, lest they become vague and be forgotten, washed away by the slow, slight, sure tides of habit and previous custom.

  “Now have a good week,” Richard said, kissing Liffey goodbye. “And look after yourself, and prune the roses round the door, and by this time next year we’ll have a baby, won’t we!” His breath smelt of Mayflower wine, and she, redolent of its opposing elderberry, could not help but be a little pleased that there had been no opportunity for love-making that weekend.