Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (27 page)

 
          
Liffey
packed a hessian bag with some meagre belongings, hitch-hiked with a startled
salesman to the station, and used the last of the week’s housekeeping for a
ticket to
London
. She had to change trains at Westbury, wait
two hours for a connection. The journey took five hours. She wondered how she
had ever thought Richard could do it daily. She arrived at Ray and Bella’s at
half-past nine in the evening.

 
          
Helga was cleaning up
the kitchen.
Liffey had met Helga once, in the old days, and not bothered to speak to her,
since she was an au-pair, and au-pairs, like servants, were uninteresting.
Helga did not much like Liffey but was shocked by her appearance. What had
seemed gamine now seemed undernourished, ill and almost
ugly.
Helga told Liffey that Bella, Ray and Richard were at the pictures. In fact Ray
was at a discotheque with Karen, but she thought that fact could perhaps emerge
mpre kindly in the course of time.

 
          
“I
only stay for the children,” said Helga. “Every night I get to bed at
midnight
. It is a very messy family.”

 
          
“Doesn’t
Richard do a lot of baby-sitting?” asked Liffey. For that was how Richard
described his evening occupation: sitting in the kitchen, working on papers
from his briefcase, while the rest of the household had a good time.

           
“Oh yes,” said Helga.
“Of course.”

 
          
At
midnight
Richard and Bella came home. Ray wasn’t
expected until after two. Helga intercepted them in the hall.

 
          
“Liffey’s
here,” she hissed.

 
          
“Oh
Christ,” said Richard, furious. He had pushed Bella into her house with his
buttocks and was looking forward to thus edging her up the stairs.

 
          
“Ask
her up,” said Bella. “She might as well know. Everyone might as well know.”

 
          
She
had been drinking.
So had Richard.

 
          
“I
couldn’t be so cruel,” said Richard. “She only has me in the world.”

 
          
But
he stood undecided until Helga pushed him into the kitchen, and Liffey ran into
his arms.

 
          
Liffey
did not mention Tucker. She merely said she missed him so much she’d decided to
come to
London
on the spur of the moment.

 
          
“But
where are you going to stay?”

 
          
“I
can share your bed, Richard.”

 
          
“My
bed is the sofa. But you can have that tonight and I’ll sleep on the floor.
I’ve got meetings all tomorrow too. I was hoping, just for once, to get some
sleep.”

 
          
The
temptations of power are indeed terrible. Richard succumbed to them. To hurt,
subtly, yet appear not to hurt, made up for a little of his sense of loss in
regard to Bella.

 
          
Liffey
slept badly on the sofa. The noise of the
London
traffic kept her awake. Yet it appeared
friendly and companionable. She wondered how she had ever found it oppressive.
To look out of the window and see not grass and cows, but people and buildings,
and the safety of civilisation—was this not good fortune? Not for nothing had
men yearned, over the generations, to escape the solitude of the countryside
and make for the pleasures of the town.

 
          
Too late.

 
          
Breakfast
with Ray and Bella was humiliating.

 
          
“Well,”
said Ray, “pregnancy has certainly made you look more like a woman and less
like a boy.
Everything going all right?”

           
“Well,” said Liffey, “it’s not really.
They say I have to have a Caesarian.”

 
          
“They
give everyone Caesarians these days,” said Bella, “at the drop of a hat. The
hospitals have to justify their monstrous expenditure on capital equipment. So
the knife’s back in fashion.”

 
          
“But
I have a placenta praevia,” replied Liffey. “It has nothing to do with
fashion.” But Richard was reading
The
Times
, and Ray and Bella fell into an argument as to who was to talk to the
Selfridges’ fish buyer.

 
          
“I
suppose you’ll be meeting Karen out of school,” said Bella. “That’s why you
can’t do it.”

 
          
“She
has her A-level art today. I said I would, Bella. She’s only a kid. She depends
on me. Her own father neglects her terribly; she has to have someone.”

 
          
“Oh
yes. Incest’s so fashionable.”

 
          
“You
are disgusting,” said Ray. “You see sex in everything.”

 
          
“Please,”
said
Helga, “not in front of the children.”

 
          
Liffey,
out of the city for six months, started to cry. Mabs and Tucker back home,
plotting: Richard reading his newspaper here, indifferent. Liffey fainted.

 
          
Helga
took Liffey round to Bella’s doctor, since Richard had an important meeting at
half-past nine. The doctor said her blood pressure was up, what was she doing
gadding about
London
, she should be safely at home in the
country,
and with a placenta praevia, anyway, she should try not to be too far from the
hospital where they had her records.

 
          
“I’m
not trying to frighten you,” said her doctor. “I just don’t want you to be
silly. You have to think of the baby.”

 
          
Liffey
rang Richard’s office and got Miss Martin and left a message. Miss Martin gave
Richard the first
part, that
Liffey was on her way
home, but left out the part about the blood pressure and staying near a
hospital, as he had another important meeting and she didn’t want to worry
him.

 
          
Liffey
remembered on the way back in the train that she had no means of getting from
the station to Honeycomb Cottage, and cried.

 
          
But
Tucker was waiting for her at the station. It seemed inevitable. She did not
even ask him how he came to be there. In fact, Richard had rung through and
asked him to meet Liffey. Miss Martin had dialled the call with reluctant
fingers.

 
          
“I
can’t stand helpless women,” said Miss Martin. “It isn’t fair. If you’re silly
and helpless like your wife, you get looked after. No one ever looks after me.”
And she cried into her typewriter—the big, ugly sobs of despised womanhood.

 
          
Later
that morning Miss Martin said that she wanted to confess to Jeff, and Richard
knew that once she did, once her guilt had been evaporated,
puffed
away in a careless word or so, she would begin to see herself as a proper
person, with feelings to be considered. She would stop being a humble typist,
grateful for her boss’s caress, and see herself as a mistress, with claims and
aspirations to all kinds of impossible things.

 
          
Richard
regarded his situation as dangerous. “You’d be unwise to tell Jeff,” he said
as casually as he could manage, knowing that those who want too badly never
get, and that to care too much is to lose power. “He’d only get upset. It’s not
as if you and he ever slept together. You’re doing him no harm; I’m only
warming his bed for him a little.”

 
          
It
was a phrase Bella used.
Bella’s phrases, through all their
lives.
Even Karen had to put up with it. Bella was feeling thwarted and
unsatisfied too. She seemed to be becoming a danger. She said there ought to be
more, somewhere, somehow, the other side of sexual acrobatics. She bought
Richard a flat Victorian carpet-beater and asked him to thwack her bottom with
it, but either her flesh was not young and smooth enough to be excited by
chastisement or he did it wrong, for all that happened was that Helga
threatened to give in her notice, since the noise they made upset the children.

 
          
“You
must not,” said Helga. “I will have to speak out. Mr. Ray will find out and we
will all be murdered.”

 
          
Bella
laughed at the idea of Ray as murderer. Part of her wanted to be murdered,
another part of her wanted Ray to know, another part wanted the nights with
Richard simply to continue.

 
          
So
did Richard.

 
          
“Helga
loves the drama,” said Bella to Richard. “She hasn’t the guts to do it herself,
so she lives through us.”

           
“Perhaps you ought to be quieter,”
suggested Richard. “It might upset the children.”

 
          
“Christ,”
said Bella. “
It’s
how they were born, weren’t they?”

 
          
Bella
could justify anything in the world she wished to justify, thought Richard.
Perhaps everyone could.

 
          
Ray
bought Karen a pound of the first cherries of the season. She bit into them
with her little white teeth. Red cherry juice ran down her chin. In the car he
held her hand and bit into it with his own rather yellowed teeth.

 
          
“Your
chin’s all stubbly,” she said. Peter’s hair grew fine and soft on his chin.
Peter was young. Ray was old. She had not told Ray about her boyfriend, Peter,
a gardener drop-out, with whom she was sleeping. She thought he might be hurt.

 
          
Richard
rang Vanessa, but she was off to a summer school for the New Altanteans, where
communication was through the spirit, not the body.

 
          
Richard
thought about giving up Vanessa. Vanessa didn’t think about it at all.

 
          
As
for Liffey, little Liffey: Liffey lay naked on the bed, on her side, while
Tucker entered her from behind.
To submit gracefully, calmly,
had seemed the best way of protecting herself and her baby and her blood
pressure.
Tucker had met her at the station: she owed him something for
that.

 
          
“You
shouldn’t go rushing up to
London
like that,” he said.
“Bad for the baby.
Bad for you.
I wasn’t going to harm you. Do anything you
didn’t want.” He spoke kindly, and what he said was true. He was concerned for
her. She was grateful. Liffey grateful to Tucker!

 
          
He
took her home, made her put her feet up, and made her tea. “I don’t know what
you’re so frightened of,” he said. “All you’ve got to do is what you want.

 
          
“I
know what pregnant women are like,” he said. “I’ve had Mabs pregnant more times
than I can remember. I like the feel of my child inside.”

 
          
“It’s
not yours,” she whispered. But she did not persist. She had to stay calm and
bring her blood pressure down. Liffey felt the baby warning her.
Careful now.
Lie down. Do as he wants. It doesn’t matter.

 
          
Tucker
put his hand on her bare tummy: he laid down his head to listen to the baby’s
heart beat. That too answered some kind of craving in her.

 
          
It
was almost pleasurable; then it actually was—she forgot herself, she cried out.
Liffey had an orgasm. Afterwards she cried—floods; all kinds of things, it
seemed, got washed away with her tears.

 
          
Liffey,
rightly or wrongly, felt she had changed. She would never easily look like a
little boy, feel like a little girl, ever again. It was a loss, she knew it—she
was at her best when very young. All charm, no sense. The days of charm were
gone. Now she was real and alive.

 
          
Liffey
looked to no kind of future beyond the day of delivery. Everything worked
towards that end.

 
          
Tucker
seemed to like her tears. He made no comment on them. “Don’t tell Mabs,’’
he
said as he went, and Liffey was safe again, knowing he
was cheating too. Their interests once again coincided.