Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (13 page)

 
          
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 female 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.

           
“You didn’t put anything in that
wine, I hope,” said Tucker to Mabs.

 
          
“Why
should I do a thing like that?” asked Mabs.
‘None
of that stuff works in any case. Or only on people who’re
stupid enough to believe in it.”

 
          
“You
can’t change people,” said Audrey, Mabs’s oldest daughter, listening when she
had no business to. “But you can make them more themselves.”

 
          
“What
do you know about it, miss?” Mabs was angry and surprised that one of her
children should have a view of the world and contribute it to the household.

 
          
“Only
what Gran tells me,” said Audrey, putting a table between herself and Mabs.
She had her father’s protection, but that only made her the more nervous of her
mother.

 
          
Mabs
looked at Audrey and saw that all of a sudden she was a young woman with
rounded hips and a bosom, and Mabs’s raised fist fell as she felt for the first
time the power of the growing daughter, sapping the erotic strength of the
mother. She was quiet for a time, and felt the more pleased, presently, that
she had dosed Liffey to keep her off Tucker and Tucker off her, and dosed
Richard so that he should pay Liffey out properly while away during the week,
and hoped again that she herself was pregnant and still young.

 
          
During the next week
the wind turned to
the north and rattled through the cottage windows, and the sky was grey and
heavy, and the Tor hidden by cloud and mist.

 
          
Liffey
cleaned and painted and patched and repaired by day, and shivered by night. She
came to know the pattern of wind and rain around the house as she lay in bed
listening, hearing the wainscot rustle with mice, and the thatch with restless
birds, and further away the hoot of an owl or the bark of a fox, and when all
these noises for once were stilled, the tone shifted in the silence itself, as
if the night were breathing. Once she heard music, faintly, on the wind, and
was surprised to remember that the night world had people in it too.

 
          
Liffey
was lonely.

 
          
Liffey
admitted defeat in her heart, and that she had been wrong, and not known what
she had wanted, like a child, and not cared what Richard had wanted, like an
unhappy child: and wanted Richard back the sooner to apologise. As soon as Mory
and Helen were disposed of, she would join Richard in
London
.

 
          
Liffey
walked to the Poldyke pub one evening in search of companionship and the host
of friendly young couples whom she had come to believe inhabited every corner
of the world, but found instead only old men drinking cider who stared at her
in an unfriendly way. She walked back home in the dark, stumbling and groping,
without a torch, having forgotten how black the night could be. Wet trees
behind her whispered and gathered.

 
          
Liffey
was frightened.

 
          
Mabs
came up once or twice for coffee and a chat, and Liffey was grateful.

 
          
Liffey
wrote a change-of-address letter to her mother. It did not mention loneliness
or fear, merely hopes fulfilled and desires gratified. She had always found it
difficult and dangerous to confide in her mother, and was accustomed to
prattling on
instead,
filling silence as now she
filled the space on the page. Madge read the letter and recognised its
insincerity and screwed it up and put it in the fire and thereafter had no
record of her daughter’s new address.

 
          
Liffey
walked to the telephone box at Poldyke to call friends, but once there lacked
the courage to put in coins and speak. It seemed as if she
were
having to pay for friendship, and she was humiliated. She walked home over the
icy stubble of the fields, and in the shadow of herself that the low sun cast
in front of her perceived a truth about herself.

 
          
She
was someone shadowy, inhabiting a world of shadows. She had not allowed the
world to be real. She had been accustomed to sitting beside a telephone and
summoning friends up out of nothingness, dialling them into existence,
consigning them to oblivion again,
putting
the
receiver down when they had served their purpose. She had no friends. How could
she have friends, who had never really believed that other people were real? It
was her punishment.

 
          
And
if Mory and Helen were real, not cut-out figures set up by Liffey in the play
of her life, to flail about for a time in front of paper sets, then perhaps
they could not be manoeuvred and manipulated: perhaps they could not be got rid
of.

 
          
Liffey
cried.

 
          
She
wondered whether Richard was real, and whether she wanted him to be real. Her
life since she had left her mother’s house had been a dream. And still her
mother would not write to her. Perhaps, thought Liffey, I am as unreal to my
mother as everyone except her is unreal to me. A child might very well seem
unreal to the mother. Something dreamed up, clothed in flesh and blood, which
sucked and gnawed and depleted.

 
          
Liffey
cried some more.

 
          
The
north wind grew stronger and came through the missing roof tiles in sudden cold
gusts.

 
          
Liffey
walked to Poldyke again and made herself telephone friends and talk and invite
them down, but they were all too busy to talk much, or thought the winter too
cold to come and stay, and though all were polite and friendly, Liffey sensed
the displeasure of those who remain, towards the one who has wilfully absented
himself: and marvelled at how out of sight could so quickly become out of mind,
not from carelessness or malice but from a desire to preserve self-esteem.

 
          
Liffey
ran out of butter and walked all the way into Poldyke again, and saw six tins
of loganberries on Mrs. Harris’s shelf, and loving tinned loganberries, bought
all six, thus leaving none for Mrs. Harris’s other customers and nearly
breaking her arm as she carried loganberries and butter back.

 
          
Liffey
thought, I must get back to civilisation quickly.

 
          
Liffey
rang Richard from Cadbury Farm to tell him all these things, but Miss Martin,
who answered, said Richard was in a meeting, and would not fetch him out of it.

 
          
The
grey sky groaned and heaved: dark, lonely days drifted into darker, lonely
nights. Liffey wanted Richard again. She dreamed he was making love to her and
she cried when she woke.

           
There was no sign of Tucker.