Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (2 page)

 
          
Tucker’s
cows moved on. Richard and Liffey were able to proceed.

 
          
“They’ll
be back,” said Mabs to Tucker. He believed her. She seemed to have a hot line
to the future, and he wished she did not. She had a reputation of being a
witch, and Tucker feared it might be justified.

           
“We don’t want city folk down
Honeycomb,” protested Tucker.

 
          
“They
might be useful,” said Mabs vaguely. Glastonbury Tor was dark and rose sharply
out of
a reddish
, fading sky. She smiled at the hill
as if it were a friend, and made Tucker still more uneasy.

 
          
There was an outer Liffey,
arrived at
twenty-eight with boyish body and tiny breasts, with a love of bright, striped
football sweaters and tight jeans, and a determination to be positive and
happy. Outer Liffey, with her fluttery smiley eyes, sweet curvy face, dark
curly hair and white smooth skin. And there was inner Liffey, cosmic Liffey,
hormones buzzing, heart beating, blood surging, pawn in nature’s game.

 
          
She
put on scent, thrust out her chest, silhouetted her buttocks and drew male
eyes to her. That way satisfaction lay: the easing of a blind and restless
procreative spirit. How could she help herself? Why should she? It was her role
in the mating dance, and Liffey danced on, as others do, long after the music
stopped.

 
          
Liffey
had lately been cross with Richard, bad-tempered, so he’d ask if her period was
due, thus making her more irritable still. Who wants to believe that her vision
of the world is conditioned by her hormonal
state, that
no one else is truly at fault, except that believing it makes it so?

 
          
“I’ve
just had my period,” she’d say, “as you surely ought to know,” and make him
feel the unfairness of it all, that he should be spared the pain and
inconvenience of a monthly menstrual flow, and she should not.

           
“Perhaps it’s the pill,” he’d say.

 
          
“I
expect it’s just me,” she’d say bitterly.

 
          
But
how was one to be distinguished from the other? For Liffey’s body was not
functioning, as her doctor remarked, as nature intended. Not that “nature” can
reasonably be personified in this way—for what is nature, after all, for living
creatures but the sum of the chance genetic events that have led us down one
evolutionary path or another? And although what seem to be its intentions may,
in a bungled and muddled way, work well enough to keep this species or that
propagating, they cannot be said always to be desirable for the individual.

 
          
But
for good or bad—that is, convenient for her, inconvenient for the race—Liffey
had interfered with her genetic destiny and was on the pill. She took one
tablet a day of factory- made oestrogen and progesterone powders mixed. As a
result, Liffey’s ovarian follicles failed to ripen and develop their egg. She
could not, for this reason, become pregnant. But her baffled body responded by
retaining fluid in its cells, and this made her from time to time more lethargic,
irritable and depressed than otherwise would have been the case. Her toes and
fingers were puffy. Her wedding ring would not come off and her shoes hurt. And
although the extra secretions from her cervix, responding to the oestrogen,
helped preserve her uterus and cervix from cancer, they also predisposed her to
thrush infections and inconveniently dampened her pants. Her liver functioned
differently to cope with the extraneous hormones, but not inefficiently. Her
carbohydrate metabolism was altered and her heart was slightly affected but was
strong and young enough to beat steadily and sturdily on.

 
          
The
veins in her white, smooth legs swelled slightly, but they too were young and
strong and did not become varicose. The clotting mechanism of her blood altered,
predisposing her to thrombo-embolic disease. But Liffey, which was the main
thing, would not become pregnant. Liffey valued her freedom and her figure, and
when older friends warned her that marriage must grow out of its early love
affair and into bricks and mortar and children, she dismissed their vision of
the world as gloomy.

 
          
Was
Liffey’s resentment of Richard a matter of pressure in her brain caused by
undue retention of fluid, or in fact the result of his behaviour? Liffey
naturally assumed it was the latter. It is not pleasant for a young woman to
believe that her behaviour is dictated by her chemistry and that her wrongs lie
in herself and not in others’ bad behaviour.

 
          
The next weekend
Liffey and Richard
took their friends Bella and Ray down to visit Honeycomb Cottage.

 
          
The
trap closed tighter.

 
          
“When
I say country,’’ said Richard, to everyone, “I mean twenty miles outside
London
at the most.
Somerset
is impossible. But as a country cottage,
it’s a humdinger.’’ He had a slightly old-fashioned vocabulary.

 
          
Richard
was, Bella always felt, a slightly old-fashioned young man. She wanted to
loosen him up. She felt there was
a wickedness
beneath the veneer of well-bred niceness and that it was Liffey’s fault it
remained so firmly battened down.

 
          
“When I say have a baby,’’ said Liffey, “I mean soon, very soon.
Not quite now.’’

 
          
Ray
had a theory that wives always made themselves a degree less interesting than
their husbands, and that Liffey, if married to, say, himself, would improve
remarkably.

 
          
Bella
and Ray were in their early forties, and their friendship with Richard and
Liffey was a matter of some speculation to Bella and Ray’s other friends.
Perhaps Bella was after Richard, or Ray after Liffey? Perhaps they aimed for foursomes?
Or perhaps—the most common consensus—Bella and Ray were just so dreadful they
had to find their friends where best they could, and choice did not enter into
it.

 
          
Bella
and Ray—who wrote cookery columns and cookery books—were a couple other couples
loved to hate. Liffey and Richard, however, such was their youth and
simplicity, accepted Ray and Bella as they were—liked, admired and trusted
them, and were flattered by their attention.

           
Ray and Bella had two children.
Bella had waited until her mid-thirties to have them, by which time her fame
and fortune were secure.

 
          
When
Bella and Ray saw the cottage they knew at once it was not for them to admire
or linger by. Its sweetness embarrassed them. Their taste ran to starker
places: they would feel ridiculous under a thatch, with roses round their
door. They rather unceremoniously left Richard and Liffey at the gate and
borrowed the car and went off to the ruins of
Glastonbury
to inspect the Monks’ Kitchen with a view
to a Special on medieval cookery.

 
          
“Richard,”
said Liffey. “The main-line station’s only ten minutes by car, and there’s a
fast early train at seven in the morning that gets you in to London by
half-past eight, and a fast one back at night so you’d be home by half-past
seven, and that’s only half an hour later than you get home now.”

 
          
The
Tor was distant today, swathed in mists, so that it rose as if from a
white sea
. And indeed the surrounding plains, the levels,
had once been marsh and sea until drained by monks to provide pasture.

 
          
“I
want to live here, Richard,” said Liffey. “If we live here I’ll come off the
pill.”

 
          
Richard
nodded. He opened Liffey’s handbag and took out her little packet of
contraceptive pills. “I don’t understand why someone who likes things to be
natural,” he said, “could ever rely on anything
so
unnatural as these.”

 
          
Richard
took Liffey round to the field at the back and threw her pills, with some
ceremony, into the stream, which recent rain had made to flow fast and free.

 
          
“I
wonder what he’s throwing away,” said Mabs watching through the glasses.

 
          
“So
long as it’s nothing as will harm the cows,” said Tucker. “They drink that
water.”

 
          
“Told
you they’d be back,” said Mabs.

 
          
And
Mabs and Tucker had a discussion as to whether it was in their best interests
to have Richard and Liffey renting the cottage, and decided that it was, so
long as they rented and didn’t buy. An outright purchaser would soon discover
that the two-acre field on the far side of the stream belonged to the cottage
and not, as Tucker pretended, to Cadbury Farm. Tucker found it convenient to
graze his cows there but would not find it convenient to pay for grazing
rights.

 
          
“You
tell your sister to tell Dick Hubbard to keep his mouth shut about the stream
field,” said Tucker.

 
          
Dick
Hubbard was the estate agent responsible for Honeycomb Cottage, with whom
Mabs’s
sister
Carol was having an affair. Dick Hubbard
was not married, but Carol was. Mabs disapproved of the relationship and did
not like Tucker mentioning it. Many things these days Mabs did not like. She
did not like being forty any more than the next woman did; she was beginning to
fear, for one reason and another, that she was infertile. She was, in general,
suffering from a feeling she could only describe as “upset”—a wavering of purpose
from day to day. And she did not like it.

 
          
“He’ll
keep it shut of his own accord,” said Mabs.

 
          
Something
about Liffey upset her even more: the arrogant turn of her head as she sat in
the car waiting for Tucker’s cows to pass, the slight condescension in the
smile, the way she leaned against Richard as if she owned him, the way she
coupled with him—as she was doing now—in the open air, like an animal. Mabs
felt that Liffey had everything too easy. Mabs felt that, rightly, Liffey had
nothing to do in the world but enjoy herself and that Liffey should be taken
down a peg or two.

 
          
“Nice
to have a new neighbor,” said Mabs comfortingly, and Tucker looked at her
suspiciously.

 
          
“I
wouldn’t fancy it down in the grass,” said Mabs. “That stream’s downright
unhealthy, and nasty things grow there at this time of year.”

 
          
“You
won’t mind when I swell up like a balloon?” Liffey was saying to Richard.

 
          
“I’ll
love you all the more,” said Richard. “I think pregnant women are beautiful.
Soft and rounded and female.”

 
          
She
lay on his chest, her bare breasts cool to his skin. He felt her limbs stiffen
and grow tense before she cried out, her voice sharp with horror. “Look! What
are they? Richard!”

           
Giant puffballs had pushed up out of
the ground a yard or so from where they lay. How could she not have noticed
them before? Three white globes, giant mushroom balls, each the size and shape
of a human skull, thinly skinned in yellowy white, stood blindly sentinel.
Liffey was on her feet, shuddering and aghast.

 
          
“They’re
only puffballs,” said Richard.
“Nature’s bounty.
They
come up overnight. What’s the matter with you?”

 
          
The
matter was that the smooth round
swelling of the fungus made
Liffey think
of a belly swollen by pregnancy, and she said so. Richard
found another one, but its growth had been stunted by tangled conch-grass, and
its surface was convoluted, brownish and rubbery.

 
          
“This
one looks like a brain in some laboratory jar,” said Richard.

 
          
He
and
I,
thought Liffey, trembling, as if aware that the
invisible bird of disaster, flying by, had glanced them with its wings.
He and I.

 
          
Bella
and Ray came round from the back of the house.

 
          
“We
knew we’d find you round here,” said Ray. “Bella took a bet on it. ‘They’ll be
at it again,’ she said. I think she’s jealous. What have you found?”

 
          
“Puffballs,”
said Richard.

 
          
“Puffballs!”

 
          
“Puffballs!”

 
          
Ray
and Bella, animated, ran forward to see.

 
          
Liffey
saw them all of a sudden with cold eyes, in clear sunlight, and knew that they
were grotesque. Bella’s lank hair was tightly pulled back, and her nose was
bulbous and her long neck was scrawny and her eyes popped as if the doll-maker
had failed to press them properly into the mould. Her tired breasts pushed
sadly into her white T-shirt: the skin on her arms was coarse and slack. Ray
was white in the bright sunlight, pale and puffy and rheumy. He wore jeans and
an open shirt as if he
were
a young man, but he
wasn’t. A pendant hung round his neck and nestled in grey, wiry, unhuman hairs.
In the city, running across busy streets, jumping in and out of taxis, opening
food from the Take Away, they seemed ordinary enough. Put them against a
background of growing green, under a clear sky, and you could see how strange
they were.

 
          
“You
simply have to take the cottage,” said Bella, “if only to bring us puffballs.
Have you any idea how rare they are?”

 
          
“What
do you
do
with them?” asked Liffey.

 
          
“Eat
them,” said Ray, “Slice them, grill them, stuff them— they have a wonderful
creamy texture, like just ripe Camem-
bert
. We’ll do
some tonight under the roast beef.”

 
          
“I
don’t like Camembert,” was all Liffey could think of to say.

 
          
Ray
bent and plucked one of the puffballs from its base, fingers gently cupping its
globe from beneath, careful not to break the taut, stretched skin. He handed it
to Bella and picked a second.

 
          
Tucker
came along the other side of the stream. Cows followed him: black-and-white
Friesians, full bumping bellies swaying from side to side. A dog brought up the
rear. It was a quiet, orderly procession.

 
          
“Oh
my God,” said Bella.
“Cows!”

 
          
“They
won’t hurt you,” said Liffey.

 
          
“Cows
kill four people a year in this country,” said Bella, who always had a
statistic to back up a fear.

 
          
“Afternoon,”
said Tucker amiably, across the stream.

 
          
“We’re
not on your land?” enquired Ray.

 
          
“Not
mine,” said Tucker. “That’s no one’s you’re on—that’s waiting for an owner.”

 
          
He
was splashing through the water towards them.
“You thinking
of taking it?
Good piece of land, your side of the stream, better than
mine this side.”

 
          
He
was across. He saw the remaining puffball. He drew back his leg and kicked it,
and it burst, as if it had been under amazing tension, into myriad pieces,
which buzzed through the air like^a maddened insect crowd, and then settled on
the ground and were still.

 
          
He
or I, thought Liffey. But just at the moment Tucker kicked she felt a pain in
her middle, so she knew it was she, and was glad, in her nice way, that Richard
was saved.
Her tummy, his brain.
Well, better kicked
to death by a farmer than sliced and cooked under roast beef by Bella and Ray.

           
“If you want to spread the spores,”
said Ray to Tucker, “that’s the best way.”

 
          
“Disgusting
things,” said Tucker. “No use for anything except footballs.”

 
          
He
told them the name of the estate agent who dealt with the property and left,
well pleased with himself. His cows munched solemnly on, on the other side of
the brook, bulky and soft- eyed.