Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (19 page)

 
          
The
reasonable part of Liffey told her that she was being absurd, that an added egg
sent by a neighbour is a mistake, not an attack; she assured herself that Mabs
had no reason to dislike her, that what had passed between her and Tucker was
over, secret, and of no consequence, and that Mabs was truly the friend she
seemed. The other, unreasonable part of Liffey cried out in wild alarm and
would not be pacified. Her sins would find her out.

 
          
Liffey
was not accustomed to being unfaithful. She did not suffer, as did many of her
married women friends, from sudden overwhelming sexual passions for this
inappropriate person or that. She was not practiced, as they were, in the arts
of forgetting, and self-justification and mendacity. Liffey tried to forget and
could not. She tried to justify and failed. She wanted to tell Richard, but the
longer the time that passed between the event and the confession, the more
difficult that became, and the more occasions on which she and Richard, Mabs
and Tucker were in the same room, sharing the same conversation, the same meal,
the more implicit deceit there must be in her silence and the more difficult it
was to break.

 
          
It
came to Liffey that she and Mabs were linked, through Tucker, in the mind in a
more compelling and complex way than ever she and Tucker had been in the flesh.
It flitted through her consciousness that this was perhaps what Mabs had
intended, but so fleetingly the notion did not take root, did not settle,
did
not open itself up for contemplation. Liffey continued
to feel uneasy, as people do, when clues are offered, and in the interests of
peace of mind and self respect, ignored.

 
          
Liffey
walked to Poldyke and rang Richard from the phone- box there, and Miss Martin
graciously allowed them to speak.

 
          
“Richard,”
said Liffey, “do you think Mabs could be a witch?”

 
          
Now,
Richard was in a meeting with a marketing man who wanted money to set up a
feasibility study on the subject of community salinity centres, which he,
Richard, could not recommend. When Liffey asked her question he already felt
much practiced in patience and answered politely and quietly. “No, Liffey, I
don’t. What are your reasons for suggesting it?”

 
          
“She
sent up some rotten eggs this morning saying they were fresh.”

 
          
“Liffey,”
said Richard reasonably, “it is hard even for a farmer’s wife to know what is
going on inside an egg.”

 
          
Liffey
accepted Richard’s version of events. She was a stay- at-home
wife,
she had already begun to believe he knew best. She
just looked at the weather from out of her window: he journeyed into strange
places, and knew many things, and understood them all.

 
          
“If
you don’t mind, Liffey,” he said, “I am rather busy,” so she put the telephone
down, and he reproved Miss Martin mildly for putting through a telephone call
while he was in a meeting. Miss Martin wept secretly because he had reproved
her, but her heart leapt at this rebuff of Liffey. Perhaps, she thought, he was
at last beginning to see Liffey for what she was.
Foolish,
empty and useless.

 
          
Carol,
in the telephone exchange, dialled through to Mabs to report.

 
          
Later
in the morning Mabs came up to Liffey and said she did hope, the eggs had been
all right; one of the hens had been
laying
outside the
nesting box, and Audrey had found the cache and had not told her until after
Tucker had come up with them.

 
          
Mabs
smiled and chatted about husbands and elm trees and babies and said it was high
time Liffey went to see the doctor, wasn’t it, and Liffey agreed and realised
she was being silly about Mabs, who was a good friend, just sometimes tactless.

 
          
“What
was all that about witches?” asked Richard at the weekend.

 
          
“Just
a silly idea,” said Liffey. “One gets silly ideas when pregnant.”

 
          
Mabs
asked them over for supper.

 
          
“Let’s
not go,” said Liffey. “We haven’t really got all that much in common.”

 
          
But
Richard wanted to go.

 
          
“You
wanted to live in the country,” said Richard. “I would have thought you could
find plenty in common. It’s not as if you were the greatest intellect in the
world, Liffey.”

 
          
He
had come home on Friday, resisting the temptation to stay over with Bella for a
smoked-salmon festival, because he had been a little worried by his brief and
surprising exchange with Liffey on the telephone. Now, since she seemed
perfectly well and cheerful, he resented having made the sacrifice. He found it
difficult to wind down on Friday evenings. He found himself looking round for
people to confide in, or chivvy, or engage in argument or sexual provocation,
while Liffey wanted him to sit quietly and stroke her hair as if they were some
still- life of a young married couple. By Saturday he wanted to do nothing but
sit and recover, while Liffey wanted him to be out mowing or digging or
painting; and on Sunday he waited for the evening, passing the time with the
Sunday papers, so that he could return to
London
and real life.

 
          
It
would be better, he told himself, when Mory and Helen were eased out of the
apartment and Liffey and he were together again. He would not need Bella or
Miss Martin then. He would not have to justify his infidelities by finding
fault with Liffey. He could still see some kind of future for them both— even a
rosy one; it was just the present he found difficult, and in particular Friday
evenings.

 
          
“You’re
never at your nicest on Fridays,” observed Liffey.

 
          
“I’m
tired,” he said.

 
          
“But
not too tired to go up to Mabs and Tucker’s?”

 
          
“No,”
said Richard.

 
          
There
was something different about Richard these days, thought Liffey. A kind of
snap of power, a glint of ice behind the boyish eyes: she saw that he might indeed
become something significant in his organisation. She was not sure she wanted
that. They were to have roamed together, hand in hand for ever, through the
long tangled grasses of life.

 
          
She
sat at Mabs’s dinner table and felt frail, and rather ill and tired, while
Richard and Tucker talked about fertilisers, about which Richard was
surprisingly knowledgeable, and milk
yields,
and Mabs
urged Liffey to eat up the gristly, fatty lumps of pork in her plateful of meat
stew. Richard thought how peaky Liffey looked and had a sudden longing for Miss
Martin’s solid plumpness. He caught Liffey’s eye, and she smiled at him, and
there was a quality of sadness in her smile, as if she mourned a lost
innocence.

 
          
“Bella,”
said Richard later in the week,
“all this is getting on top of me. It has to stop. It’s not as if it were
love.”

 
          
Bella
just laughed. It was not easy to hurt Bella. She sat on top of him, breasts
full and firm, swaying backwards and forwards calmly and slowly and smoking a
cigarette, which he supposed was ridiculous but nevertheless appealed to him.

 
          
“If
it were love,” said Bella, “I wouldn’t be doing it. Love hurts. This is just
sex.”

 
          
Richard’s
feelings were wounded. He thought she ought to love him. He thought that her
not loving him might be dangerous, making him more inclined to love her. He
would wait until she loved him, and then, having given her back a whole range
of feelings she had forgotten that she had, would quietly and gently leave.
That was what a man could, and did, do for an older woman.

 
          
He
could wait until Miss Martin was out of love with him, and then quietly and
gently leave her. That was what a kindly man did when the object of someone
else’s unrequited love. Richard wanted to do his best for everyone.

 
          
Mr.
and Mrs. Lee-Fox rang Richard and said they’d pay for Liffey to have her baby
as a private patient so she didn’t have to go through the ordeal of a public
ward.

 
          
It
was a
light,
friendly, easy telephone conversation—one
parent on each of two telephone extensions. Richard knew it had taken them a
good week of urgent, desperate, anxious conversation, planning and
sleeplessness to achieve this ease and unanimity.
So major
decisions had always been dropped into his life.
First closed doors,
raised voices kept determinedly low, the feeling of agitation and argument in
the house, then bombshells presented like grapenuts at breakfast. You’re going
to boarding school. We’re going away: you’re to stay with Aunt Betty. We’ve
written to your school—you’re having extra tutoring.

 
          
“Not
in front of the child,” the Lee-Fox’s had agreed on their honeymoon—both having
been the victims of naked parental conflict.
Never in front
of the children.
Our child, as it turned out to be. Had it been
children, such resolutions might have been abandoned.

 
          
Richard
at his office was a great protagonist of open decision-making. His every
thought, his every conclusion, his every action was recorded by Miss Martin and
circulated throughout the department. Never, thought Miss Martin, was there an
office from which streamed so many memos and minutes.

 
          
“We’ll
hide nothing from our child,” Richard said to Liffey on one of the rare
occasions he spoke about their coming baby. “We won’t let happen to it what
happened to me.”

 
          
He
passed on the news of his parents’ offer to Liffey.

 
          
“Have
it privately?” Liffey was unenthusiastic, thus surprising Richard. “No. I’d
rather have it like anyone else. I don’t want to be thought special. I’m not.”

 
          
So
then Richard had to ring his parents back, and in refusing their offer sound
both ungracious and ungrateful.

 
          
“No,”
said Bella darkly, nibbling Richard’s ear. “I don’t think this is the dawn of
social conscience in Liffey. I think it is selfinterest. In private wards you
bleed to death by yourself. At least in the public wards there are other
patients there to help you.”

 
          
“You’re
not at all nice about Liffey,” complained Richard. “You should remember I’m
married to her and be more tactful. Don’t you feel in the least guilty about
her? You are taking what is hers by rights.”

 
          
“No
man is the rightful property of any woman, and vice versa.”

 
          
“But
you’re liberated. I thought Liffey was supposed to be your sister.”

 
          
“So
she is. She is welcome to Ray any time she likes. Perhaps she would like to come
and stay for the weekend?”

 
          
“I
don’t want Liffey anywhere near this house,” said Richard with some passion,
but Bella curled her tongue around his, and although the texture of her flesh
between his thighs did not have the resilience of Liffey’s or the firm solidity
of Miss Martin’s, it had a kind of practiced feel, as if sexual impulses
travelled a well-worn, easy path, coming and going with conviction; and
marvelling at this, he stopped worrying about Liffey.

 
          
Miss
Martin was not so outspoken when it came to her feelings towards Liffey. She
confined her comments to “um”s and “welf’s and “I see”s, but timed them so that
Richard would begin to see Liffey as Miss Martin saw her—as someone damaging
to his professional, emotional, financial and physical well-being. I am one of
the world’s givers, said Miss Martin, by her very lack of sexual response,
lying beneath Richard in hotel or board room or cloakroom; I am not one of the
world’s takers. Not like Liffey.

 
          
Liffey, whom she had never seen.
Liffey, the
boss’s wife.
Above her in status, the marriage partner, not the
concubine. Concubines travel through the house by night, with long needles to
plunge into the hearts of wives. They kill, if they can, through love, spite
and anger
mixed
.