Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (12 page)

 
          
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.

 
          
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.”