Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (7 page)

 
          
“You
won’t put anything in her coffee?” said Tucker suspiciously. “I’m a good
enough man without, aren’t I?”

 
          
Mabs
looked him up and down. He was small but he was wiry; the muscles stood out on
his wrists, his mouth was sensuous and his nostrils flared.

 
          
“You’re
good enough without,” she said. But in Mabs’s world men were managed, not
relied upon, and were seldom told more than partial truths. And women were to
be controlled, especially young women who might cause trouble, living on the borders
of the land, and a channel made through them, the better to do it. Tucker, her
implement, would make the channel.

 
          
“I’ll
go this evening,” he said, delaying for no more reason than that he was busy
hedging in the afternoon, and although he was annoyed, he stuck to it.

 
          
Liffey
ate Mabs’s scones for lunch. They were very heavy and gave her indigestion.

 
          
A
little black cat wandered into the kitchen during the afternoon. Liffey knew
she was female. She rubbed her back against Liffey’s leg and meowed, and looked
subjugated, tender and grateful all at once. She rolled over on her back and
yowled. She wanted a mate. Liffey had no doubt of it: she recognised something
of herself in the cat, which was hardly more than a kitten and too young to
safely have kittens of her own. Liffey gave her milk and tinned salmon. During
the afternoon the cat sat in the garden, and toms gathered in the bushes and
set up their yearning yowls, and Liffey felt so involved and embarrassed that
she went and lay down on her mattress on the floor —which was the only bed she
had—and her own breath came in short, quick gasps, and she stretched her arms
and knew she wanted something, someone, and assumed it was Richard, the only
lover she had ever had, or ever—until that moment— hoped to have. Gradually the
excitement, if that was what it was, died. The little cat came in; she seemed
in pain. She complained, she rolled
about,
she seemed
talkative and pleased with herself.

 
          
Farmyards,
thought Liffey. Surely human beings are more than farmyard animals? Don’t we
have poetry, and paintings, and great civilisations, and history? Or is it only
men who have these things? Not women. She felt, for the first time in her life,
at the mercy of her body.

 
          
Richard,
four hours late at the office, had to fit his morning’s work into the
afternoon, remake appointments, and rearrange meetings. It became obvious that
he would have to work late. His anger with Liffey was extreme: he felt no
remorse for having hit her. Wherever he looked, whatever he remembered, he
found justification for himself in her bad behaviour. Old injuries, old
traumas, made themselves disturbingly felt. At fifteen he had struck his father
for upsetting his mother: he felt again the same sense of rage, churned up with
love, and the undercurrent of sadistic power, and the terrible knowledge of
victory won. And once his mother had sent off the wrong forms at the wrong
time, and Richard had failed as a result to get a university place.
Or so he chose to think, blaming his mother for not making his path
through life smooth, recognising the hostility behind the deed, as now he
blamed Liffey, recognising her antagonism towards his work.
It was as if
during the angry drive to the office a trapdoor had opened up that hitherto had
divided his conscious, kindly, careful self from the tumult, anger and
confusion below, and the silt and sludge now surged up to overwhelm him. He
asked Miss Martin to send a telegram to Liffey saying he would not be home that
night.

 
          
Miss
Martin raised her eyes to his for the first time. They were calm, shrewd,
gentle eyes. Miss Martin would never have misread a train timetable.

 
          
“Oh,
Mr. Lee-Fox,” said Miss Martin, “you have got yourself into a pickle!”

 
          
Mabs’s children
came home on the school
bus. Other children wore orange arm bands, provided by the school in the
interests of road safety.
But not Mabs’s children.

 
          
“I’m
not sewing those things on. If they’re daft enough to get run over they’re
better dead. Isn’t that so,
Tucker
?”

 
          
Today
the children carried a telegram for Liffey. Mrs. Harris, who ran the sub-post
office in
Crossley
had asked them to take it up to
Honeycomb Cottage. They gave it instead to Mabs, who steamed the envelope open
and read the contents, more for confirmation than information, for Mrs. Harris
had told the children, who told Mabs, that Richard would not be coming home
that night. He was staying with Bella instead.

           
Bella?
Who
was Bella?
Sister, mistress, friend?

 
          
Tucker
consented to take the telegram up to Liffey. No sooner had he gone than Mabs
began to wish he had stayed. She became irritable and gave the children a hard
time along with their tea. She chivvied Audrey into burning the bacon, slapped
Eddie for picking up the burnt bits with his fingers, made Kevin eat the
half-cooked fatty bits so that he was sick, and then made Debbie and Tracy wipe
Kevin’s sick up. But it was done: they were fed. All were already having
trouble with their digestions, and would for the rest of their lives.

 
          
When
Mabs was pregnant she was kinder and slower, but Kevin, the youngest, was four
and had never known her at her best. He was the most depressed but least
confused.

 
          
Liffey,
wearing rubber gloves and dark glasses as well as four woollies, opened the
door to Tucker. She knew from his demeanour that he had not come to deliver
telegrams, or to mend fuses (although he did this for her later) but to bed her
if he could. The possibility that he might, the intention that he should, hung
in the air between them. He did not touch her, yet the glands on either side of
her vaginal entrance responded to sexual stimulation—as such glands do, without
so much as a touch or a caress being needed—by a dramatic increase in their
secretions.

 
          
Like
the little black cat in heat, thought Liffey. Horrible! She made no connection
between her response and Mabs’s scones, with their dose of mistletoe and
something else. How could she?

 
          
I
am not a nice girl at all, thought Liffey. No. All that is required of me is
the time, the place and the opportunity, a willing stranger at the door
unlikely to reproach me, and dreams of fidelity and notions of virtue and
prospects of permanence fly out the window as he steps in the door.

 
          
Love
is the packet, thought Liffey, that lust is sent in, and the ribbons are quickly
untied.

 
          
If
I step back, thought Liffey, this man will step in after me and that will be
that.

 
          
“Come
in, come in,” Liffey’s whole body sang, but a voice from Madge answered back,
“Wanting is not doing, Liffey. Almost nothing you can’t do without.”

           
Liffey did not step back. She did
not smile at Tucker. But her breath came rapidly.

 
          
Tucker
introduced himself.
Farmer, neighbour, Mabs’s husband.
Owner of the field where the black-and-white cows grazed.
Kicker of puffballs.
Liffey remembered him now by his
steel-capped boots. She remained formal and friendly. But Tucker
knew
, and knew that she knew, what there
could be, was to be, between them.

 
          
Tucker
handed over the telegram.

 
          
“My
husband can’t get back this evening,” said Liffey brightly and briskly, reading
it. She knew better than to betray emotion at such a time. But she minded very
much.

 
          
A
fighter plane zoomed over the Tor, startling both, and was gone. Tucker Pierce
smiled at Liffey. Liffey’s eyelids drooped as other parts of her contracted in
automatic beat. Oh, little black cat, squirming over the cool ground, the
better to put out the fire within! Tucker moved closer. Liffey stood her
ground, chanting an inner incantation of nonsense and aspiration mixed.
Richard, I love you, Richard, I am spirit, not animal: Tucker, in the name of
love, in the name of God, in the name of Richard, flawed and imperfect as he
is, Tucker, stay where you are.

 
          
Tucker
stayed; Tucker talked, still on the step.

 
          
“Come
the spring,” said Tucker, “you’ll
be wanting
our cows
in your field. Keep the grass and the thistles down.

 
          
“Not
to mention the docks,” said Tucker. “Docks can be a terrible nuisance.

 
          
“Don’t
thank me,” said Tucker. “We’re neighbours, after all.

 
          
“Any
little bits and pieces you need doing,” said Tucker. “Just ask.

 
          
“Looks
cosy in there,” said Tucker, peering over Liffey’s shoulder into the colourful
warmth within. “I see you’ve a way with rooms, making them look nice,
feminine-like.”

 
          
And
indeed Liffey had—tacking up a piece of fabric here, a bunch of dried flowers
there. She adorned rooms as she hesitated to adorn herself. She loved silks
and velvets and rich embroideries and plump cushions and old faded colours.

 
          
Tucker
looked longingly within. Liffey stood her ground.

           
“Come on down to the farm,” said
Tucker, remembering Mabs’s instructions, “and have a cup of coffee with Mabs.

 
          
“Mabs
is always glad of company,”
lied
Tucker. “One thing to
be on your own when you expect it,” observed Tucker, with truth. “Quite another
when you don’t. You’ll be feeling lonely, I dare say.”

 
          
“Not
really,” said Liffey, with as much conviction as she could muster. “But I’d be
glad to use your telephone, if I could.”

 
          
They
walked down together along the rutted track. Tucker Pierce, farmer, married,
father of five, muddy-booted, dirty-handed, coarse-featured, but smiling,
confident and easy, secure in his rights and expectations.
And
little Liffey, feeling vulnerable and flimsy, a pawn on someone else’s
chessboard, not the queen.
She saw herself through Tucker’s eyes. She
saw that her frayed jeans could represent poverty as well as universal
brotherhood, and skinniness malnutrition, rather than the calculated reward of
a high-protein, low-calorie diet.

 
          
Liffey
had to run to keep up with Tucker.
Her country shoes, so
absurdly stout in
London
, appeared flimsy here,
while his clumsy boots moved easily over the hollows and chasms of the rutted
path.

 
          
“It’s
quiet up here,” said Tucker, turning to her.

 
          
Not
here, she thought, not here in the open, like an animal —and then, not here,
not anywhere, never!

 
          
Liffey
rang Richard’s office from the cold hall of Cadbury Farm. Miss Martin said
Richard was not available, having gone to a meeting at an outside advertising
agency, and she did not expect him back.

 
          
“Didn’t
he leave a message?”

 
          
“No.”

 
          
Liffey
rang Bella, and the au-pair girl Helga answered. Bella and Ray were dining out
with Mr. Lee-Fox.
Perhaps if Liffey rang later?
At
midnight
?

 
          
“No.
It wouldn’t be practical,” said Liffey.

 
          
“Any message?”

 
          
“No,”
said Liffey.

 
          
“You
do look cold,” said Mabs. “Pull a chair to the fire.”

 
          
And
she poured Liffey some coffee in a cracked cup. The coffee was bitter.

           
Mabs chatted about the children and
schools and cows and smoking chimneys. Tucker said nothing. The kitchen was
large, stone-flagged, handsome and cold. The same pieces of furniture,
substantial rather than gracious, had stood here for generations—dresser,
tables, sideboards, chairs—and were half-despised, half-admired by virtue of
their very age. Tucker and Mabs boasted of the price they would fetch in the
auction room, while using the table, almost on purpose, to mend sharp or oily
pieces of farm machinery, and the edge of the dresser for whittling knives, and
covering every available surface with the bric-a-brac of everyday
life—receipts, bills, brochures, lists, padlocks, beads, hair rollers, badges,
lengths of string, plastic bags, scrawled addresses, children’s socks and toys,
plasters, schoolbooks, and tubes of this and pots of that. Neither Mabs nor
Tucker, thought Liffey, marvelling, were the sort to throw anything away, and
had the grace to feel ashamed of
herself
for being the
sort of person who threw out a cup when it was chipped or a dress when she was
tired of it or furniture when it bored her.

 
          
Cadbury
Farm, she saw, served as the background to Tucker and Mabs’s life; it was not,
as she was already making out of Honeycomb Cottage, a part, almost the purpose,
of life itself.

 
          
Liffey
went home as soon as she politely could.

 
          
“It’s
getting dark,” said Mabs. “Tucker had better go with you. I’m not saying
there’s a headless horseman out there, but you might meet a flying saucer.
People do, round here.
Mostly on their way home from the pub,
of course.
All the same, Tucker’ll take you. Won’t you, Tucker?”

 
          
“That’s
right,” said Tucker.

 
          
But
Liffey insisted on going by herself, and then felt frightened and wished Tucker
was indeed with her, whatever the cost, particularly at that bend of the road
where the wet branches seemed unnaturally still, as if waiting for something
sudden and dreadful to happen. But she hurried on, and pulled the pretty
curtains closed when she got to the cottage, and switched on the radio, and
soon was feeling better again, or at any rate not frightened, merely angry with
Richard and upset by her own feelings towards Tucker, and fearful of some kind
of change in herself, which she could hardly understand, but knew was
happening, and had its roots in the realisation that she was not the nice,
good, kind, pivotal person she had believed, around whom the rest of an
imperfect creation revolved, but someone much like anyone else, as nice and as
good as circumstance would allow, but not a whit more, and certainly no better
than anyone else at judging the rightness or wrongness of her own actions.

 
          
Desire
for Richard overwhelmed her when she lay down to sleep on the mattress on the
floor. It was, for Liffey, an unusual and physical desire for the actual cut
and thrust of sexual activity, rather than the emotional need for tenderness
and recognition and the celebration of good things which Liffey was accustomed
to contriving as desire, for lack of a better word. Presently images of Tucker
replaced images of Richard, and Liffey rose and took a sleeping pill, thinking
this might help her. All it did was to seem to paralyse her limbs whilst
agitating her mind still more; and a sense of the blackness and loneliness
outside began to oppress her, and an image of a headless horseman to haunt
her, and she wondered whether choosing to live in the country had been an act
of madness, not sanity, and presently rose and took another sleeping pill, and
then fell into a fitful sleep, in which Tucker loomed large and erect.

 
          
But
she had locked the door. So much morality, prudence, and the habit of virtue
enabled her to do.