Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (6 page)

 
          
On
Thursday morning
Liffey’s little
alarm watch woke them at six. Liffey was up in a trice to make Richard’s
breakfast. The hot-water system was not working and there was ice in the wash
basin, but he laughed bravely. Liffey had the times of the trains written out
and pinned up above the mantlepiece. She tried to light the kitchen stove but
the chimney was cold and filled the room with smoke. She could not get the
kettle to boil; she plugged in the toaster and all the electricity in the house
fused; she could not grind the coffee beans for coffee. The transistor radio
produced only crackle—clearly here it would need an aerial. Richard stopped
smiling. Liffey danced and kissed and pinched and hugged, and he managed a wan
smile as he found the old candles he’d noticed in the fuse box.

 
          
“I
suppose, darling, they’d die if you took another day off work?”

 
          
“Yes,
they would,” said Richard, longing for the warmth and shiny bright order of the
office, and the solidarity of Miss Martin who never pranced or kissed but
offered him hot instant coffee in plastic mugs at orderly intervals.

 
          
Richard
left the house at seven-thirty. Castle Tor station was twelve minutes’ drive
away, and the train left at
seven fifty-two
.

 
          
“Allow
lots of time,” said Liffey, “this first morning.”

 
          
Richard
was delayed by the cow mire outside Cadbury Farm. The little Renault sank
almost to its axles in the slime, for it had thawed overnight and what the day
before had been a hard surface now revealed its true nature. But revving and
reversing freed the vehicle, though it woke the dogs, and he arrived, heart
beating fast, at Castle Tor station at seven-fifty. The station was closed. As
he stood, open-mouthed, the fast train shot through.

 
          
Richard
arrived back at Honeycomb Cottage at five minutes past eight. He stepped inside
and slapped Liffey on the face as she straightened up from lighting the fire,
face blackened by soot.

 
          
Castle
Tor station was closed all winter. Liffey had been reading the summer
timetable. The nearest station was
Taunton
, on another line, twenty miles away. The
journey from there to Paddington would take three hours. Six hours a day,
thirty hours a week, spent sitting on a train, was clearly intolerable. And
another eight hours a week spent driving to and from the station. To drive to
London
, on congested roads, would take even
longer.

 
          
Richard
hissed all this to Liffey, got back into his car, and drove off again.

 
          
Liffey
cried.

 
          
“I
wonder what all that was about,” said Tucker, putting down the field glasses.

           
“Go on up and find out,” said Mabs.

 
          
“No,
you go,” he said.

 
          
So
later in the morning Mabs put on her Wellington boots and her old brown coat
with the missing buttons and paddled through the mire to Honeycomb Cottage and
made herself known to Liffey as friend and neighbour.

 
          
“Do
come in,” cried Liffey.
“How kind of you to call!
Coffee?”

 
          
Mabs
looked at Liffey and knew she was a bubble of city froth, floating on the
scummy surface of the sea of humanity, breakable between finger and thumb.
Liffey trusted the world and Mabs despised her for it.

 
          
“I’d
rather have tea,” said Mabs.

 
          
Liffey
bent to riddle the fire, and her little buttocks were tight and rounded,
defined beneath stretched denim. The backside of a naughty child, not of a
grown woman, who knows the power and murk that lies beneath and shrouds
herself
in folds of cloth.

 
          
So thought Mabs.

 
          
Liffey
was a candy on the shelf of a high-class confectioner’s shop. Mabs would have
her down and take her in and chew her up and suck her through, and when she had
extracted every possible kind of nourishment, would spit her out, carelessly.

 
          
Liffey
looked at Mabs and saw a smiling, friendly countrywoman with a motherly air
and no notion at all of how to make the best of
herself
.

 
          
Liffey
was red-eyed but had forgiven Richard for hitting her. She could understand
that he was upset. And it had been careless of her to have misread the train
timetable. But she was confident that he would be back that evening with roses
and apologies and sensible plans as to how to solve the commuting problem. And
if it were in fact insoluble, then they would just have to move back into the
London
apartment, apologising to Mory and Helen
for having inconvenienced them, and keep Honeycomb as a weekend cottage. Liffey
could afford it, even if Richard couldn’t. His pride, his vision of himself as
husband and provider, would perhaps have to be dented just a little. That was
all.

           
Nothing terrible had happened. If
you were an ordinary, reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-intentioned
person, nothing terrible could happen.
Surely.

 
          
Liffey
shivered.

 
          
“Anything
the matter?” asked Mabs.

 
          
“No,”
said Liffey, lying. Lying was second nature to Liffey, for Madge, her mother,
always spoke the truth. Families tend to share out qualities amongst them, this
one balancing that, and in families of two, as were Madge and Liffey, the
result can be absurd.

 
          
At
that very moment Mory, who had brutal, concrete architectural tastes, looked
round Liffey’s pretty apartment and said, “Christ, Liffey has awful taste!” and
then, “Shall we burn
that
?” and Helen
nodded, and Mory took a little bamboo wall shelf and snapped it between cruel,
smooth, city hands and fed it into the fire, so that they both felt warmer.

 
          
“I
hope Dick Hubbard’s given you a proper lease,” said Mabs. “You can’t trust that
man an inch.”

 
          
“Richard
sees to all that,” said Liffey, and Mabs thought, Good, she’s the fool she
seems.

 
          
Mabs
was all kindness. She gave Liffey the names of doctor, dentist, thatcher,
plumber and electrician. “You don’t want to let this place run down,” she said.
“It could be a real little love nest.”

 
          
Liffey
was happy. She had found a friend in Mabs. Mabs was real and warm and direct and
without affectation. In the clear light of Mabs, her former friends, the
coffee-drinking, trinketbuying, theatre-going young women of her
London
acquaintance, seemed like mouthing
wraiths.

 
          
A
flurry of cloud had swept over from the direction of the Tor and left a
sprinkling of thin snow, and then the wind had died as suddenly as it had
sprung up, and now the day was bright and sparkling, and flung itself in
through the windows, so that"she caught her breath at the beauty of it
all. Somehow she and Richard would stay here. She knew it.

 
          
Mabs
stood in the middle of her kitchen, as if she were a tree grown roots, and she,
Liffey, was some slender plant swaying beneath her shelter, and they were all
part of the same earth, same purpose.

           
“Anything the matter?” asked Mabs
again, wondering if Liffey were half-daft as well.

 
          
“Just
thinking,” said Liffey, but there were tears in her eyes. Some benign spirit
had touched her as it flew. Mabs was uneasy: her own malignity increased. The
moment passed.

 
          
Mabs
helped Liffey unpack and put things straight, and half-envied and half-despised
her for the unnecessary prodigality of everything she owned—from
thick-bottomed saucepans to cashmere blankets. Money to burn, thought Mabs.
Tucker would provide her with logs in winter and manure in summer: she’s the
kind who never checks the price. A commission would come Mabs’s way from every
tradesman she recommended. Liffey would be a useful source of income.

 
          
“Roof
needs re-doing,” said Mabs. “The thatch is dried out: it becomes a real
fire-risk, not to mention the insects! I’ve a cousin who’s a thatcher. He’s
booked up for years, but I’ll have a word with him. He owes me a favour.”

 
          
“I’m
not certain we’ll be able to stay,” said Liffey sadly, and Mabs was alerted to
danger. She saw Liffey as an ideal neighbour, controllable and malleable.

 
          
“Why not?” she asked.

 
          
Public
tears stood in Liffey’s eyes at last, as they had not done for years. She could
not help herself. The strain of moving house, imposing her will, acknowledging
difficulty, and conceiving deceit was too much for her. Mabs put a solid arm
round Liffey’s small shoulders and asked what the matter was. It was more than
she ever did for her children. Liffey explained the difficulty over the train
timetable.

 
          
“He’ll
just have to stay up in
London
all week and come back home weekends. Lots of them round here do that,”
said Mabs.

 
          
Liffey
had not spent a single night apart from Richard since the day she married him
and was proud of her record. She said as much, and Mabs felt a stab of
annoyance, but it did not show on her face, and Liffey continued to feel
trusting.

 
          
“Lots
of wives would say that cramped their style,” said Mabs.

 
          
“Not
me,” said Liffey. “I’m not that sort of person at all. I’m a one-man woman. I
mean to stay faithful to Richard all my life. Marriage is for better or worse,
isn’t it?”

           
“Oh yes,” said Mabs politely. “Let’s
hope your Richard feels the same.”

 
          
“Of
course he does,” said Liffey stoutly. “I know accidents can happen. People get drunk
and don’t know what they’re doing. But he’d never be unfaithful, not properly
unfaithful. And nor would I—ever, ever, ever.”

 
          
Mabs
spent a busy morning. She went up to her mother and begged a small jar of oil
of mistletoe and a few drops of the special potion, the ingredients of which
her mother would never disclose, and went home and baked some scones and took
them up to Liffey as a neighbourly gesture, and when Tucker came home to his
mid-day meal told him to get up to Liffey as soon as possible.

 
          
“What
for?” asked Tucker.

 
          
“You
know what for,” said Mabs. She was grim and excited all at once. Liffey was to
be proved a slut, like any other. Tucker was to do it, and at Mabs’s behest,
rather than on his own initiative, sometime later.

 
          
“You
know you don’t really want me to,” said Tucker, alarmed, but excited too.

 
          
“I
don’t want her going back to
London
and leaving that cottage empty for Dick
Hubbard to sell,” said Mabs, searching for reasons. “And I want her side of the
field for grazing, and I want her taken down a peg or two, so you get up there,
Tucker.”

 
          
“Supposing
she makes trouble,” said Tucker.
“Supposing she’s difficult.”

 
          
“She
won’t be,” said Mabs, “but if she is, bring her down for a cup of coffee so we
all get to know each other better.”