Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (9 page)

 
          
She
was worrying about nothing, worrying even as she cried out again in pleasure—or
was it pain—Tucker now behind her, she on her side, held fast in his arms. They
were like animals: she had not cared; now she began to—she wanted Richard.
Where was Richard? If he hadn’t missed his train none of this would have
happened.
Richard’s fault.
It could not happen again:
it must not happen again: she would have to make clear to Tucker it would not
happen again: so long as he understood what she was saying, peasant that he
was. Even as she began to be horrified of him he finished, and whether she was
satisfied or
not she could not be sure
. She thought
so. It was certainly a matter of indifference to Tucker. He returned to the
table and his cold tea. He wanted the pot filled up with boiling water. She
obliged in silence and poured more.

 
          
“I
suppose you could develop a taste for it,” he said. “But I’d better be getting
back to Mabs.”

 
          
He
left. Liffey went back to bed and to sleep, and the sleeping pills caught up
with her, and it was two in the afternoon before she woke again, and when she
did, the dream of Tucker and the actuality of Tucker were confused. Had it not
been for the state of her nightshirt and the grazing on her legs and the
patches of abraded roughness round her mouth, she would have dismissed the
experience altogether as the kind of dream a woman dreams when she sleeps alone
for the first time in years. But she could not quite do that.

 
          
Liffey
balanced the incident in her mind against Richard’s scuffling with his
secretary at the office party and decided that the balance of fidelity had been
restored. There was no need to feel guilty. At the same time there was every
reason not to let it happen again. She had the feeling Tucker would not return,
at any rate not in the same way. He had marked
her, that
was all, and put her in her proper place. She felt sure she could rely upon his
discretion. She was even relieved. Now that Richard had been paid out, she
could settle down to loving him again. She felt she had perhaps been angrier
with him than she had thought.

 
          
“Well?”
enquired Mabs when Tucker returned. The children were off on the school bus.
Eddie had a bruise on his back. She had given him a note to take to his teacher
saying he had a sore foot and could he be excused physical training, which was
done in singlet and pants.

 
          
“Skinny,”
complained Tucker.
“Nothing to it.”

 
          
She
pulled him down on top of her, to take the taste of Liffey out of him as soon
as possible.

           
“Not like you,” said Tucker.
“Nothing’s like you.”

 
          
“But
we’ll get the cows in her field,” Mabs comforted herself.

 
          
“We’ll
get whatever we want,” said Tucker. He felt the distress in her and kissed her
dangerous eyes closed, in case the distress should turn to anger and sear them
all.

 
          
“She’s
just a little slut,” said Mabs. “I knew she was from the way she talked. Don’t
you go near her again, Tucker, or I’ll kill you.”

 
          
He
thought he wouldn’t, because she might.

 
          
If
he’d been a cockerel, all the same, he’d have crowed.

 
          
Taking
and leaving Liffey. He liked Liffey.

 
          
Mabs
asked Carol later if she knew what it was her mother mixed in with the
mistletoe, and Carol said no, she didn’t. But whatever it was, it had got her
Dick Hubbard.

 
          
“It’s
not that I believe in any of mother’s foolery,” said Carol, “any more than you
do. It’s just that it works. At least to get things started. It would never get
a river flowing uphill—but if there’s even so much as a gentle slope down, it
sure as hell can start the flood.”

 
          
Richard,
taking Bella’s words to heart,
if not her body to his, went round to the apartment before going to work, to
explain to Mory and Helen that a mistake had been made and that he and Liffey
would have to return to
London
. Liffey, Richard had decided, would have to put up with using Honeycomb
Cottage .as a weekend retreat, and he would have to put up with her paying for
its rent—not an unpleasant compromise for either of them—until his verbal
contract with Dick Hubbard to take the cottage for a year could be said to
have expired. “Never go back on a deal just because you can,” Richard’s father
had instructed him, “even if it’s convenient. A man’s word is his bond. It is
the basis on which all
civilisation
is based.” And
Richard believed him, following the precept in his private life, if not
noticeably on his employers’ behalf.

 
          
“Never
let a woman pay for herself,” his mother had said, slipping him money when he
was nine so he could pay for her coffee, and confusion had edged the words
deeply into his mind. “Never spend beyond your income,” she would say, “I never
do,” when he knew it was not true.

 
          
Now
he earnestly required Liffey to live within his income whilst turning a blind
eye to the fact that they clearly did not —that avocados and strawberries and
pigskin wallets belonged to the world of the senior executive, not junior. The
important thing, both realised, was to save face. She seriously took his
housekeeping money, and he seriously did not notice when it was all used upon
one theatre outing.

 
          
It
was difficult, Richard realised on the way up the stairs, to fulfil his
obligation both to Dick Hubbard and to Mory, who had been promised a pleasant
apartment and who now must be disappointed. It could not, in fact, be done; and
for this dereliction Richard blamed Liffey. He resolved, however, out of
loyalty to a wife whom he had gladly married, to say nothing of all this to
Mory.

 
          
The
familiar stairs reassured him, the familiar early-morning smells of other
peoples’ lives: laundry, bacon, coffee.
The murmur of known
voices.
This was home. Three days away from it and already he was
homesick. He could never feel the same for Honeycomb Cottage, although for
Liffey’s sake he would have tried. Wet leaves, dank grass and a sullen sky he
could persuade himself were seasonal things, but the running, erratic narrative
of the apartment block would never be matched, for Richard, by the plodding,
repetitive story of the seasons.

 
          
I
am a creature of habit, said Richard to himself.

 
          
“I
am a creature of habit!” Richard’s mother had been accustomed to saying,
snuggling into her fur coat or her feather cushion, eyes bright and winsome,
when anyone had suggested she do something new—such as provide a dish on
Tuesday other than shepherd’s pie, or get up early enough in the morning to
prepare a packed lunch for Richard, or go somewhere on holiday other than Alassio,
Italy. “I am a creature of habit!”

           
Perhaps, Richard thought now, one
day I will understand my mother, and the sense of confusion will leave me.

           
Richard knocked on his own front
door. Helen’s sister Lally, pregnant body wrapped in her boyfriend’s donkey-jacket,
opened the door. She wore no shoes. Richard, startled, asked to see Mory or
Helen.

 
          
“They’re
asleep,” said Lally. “Go away and come back later whoever you are,” and she
shut the door in his face. She was very pretty and generally feted, and saw no
need to be pleasant to strange men. She believed, moreover, that women were far
too likely for their own good to defer to men, and was trying to stamp out any
such tendency in
herself
, thus allying, most
powerfully, principle to personality.

 
          
Richard
hammered on the door.

 
          
“This
is my home!” he cried. “I live here.”

 
          
Eventually
Mory opened the door. Richard had not seen Mory for three months. Then he had
worn a suit and tie and his hair cleared his collar. Now, pulling on jeans,
hopping from foot to foot, hairy-chested, long-haired, he revealed himself as
what Richard’s mother would describe as a hippie.

 
          
“Don’t
lose your cool, man,” said Mory. “What’s the hassle?”

 
          
“Is
that really you?” asked Richard, confused more by the hostility in look and
tone than by the change in Mory’s appearance, marked though it was.

 
          
“So
far as I know,” said Mory cunningly.

 
          
He
did not ask Richard in. On the contrary, he now quite definitely blocked the
door, and Richard, who had just now seen himself as a knight errant, was
conscious of a number of shadowy, barefoot creatures within, and knew that his
castle had been besieged and taken, and was full of alien people, and that only
force of arms would win it back.

 
          
Richard
explained. He was cautious and formal.

 
          
“That’s
certainly shitsville, man,” said Mory, “but it was on your say-so we split, and
our pad’s gone now, and what are we supposed to do, sleep on the streets to
save you a train journey? Didn’t you see Lally was pregnant?”

 
          
Richard
said he would go to law.

 
          
Mory
said Richard was welcome to go to law, and in three years’ time Richard might
manage an eviction.

           
“We’ve got the law tied up, man,”
said Mory. “It’s on the side of the people now. You rich bastards are just
going to have to squeal.”

 
          
Mory’s
language had changed, along with his temperament. Richard remarked on it to
Miss Martin when he reached the office. He was already on the phone to his
solicitor.

 
          
“He
may have been popping acid,” remarked Miss Martin, “or he may have been like
that all the time. People’s true natures reveal themselves when it comes to
accommodation. It’s the territorial imperative.”

 
          
The
solicitor sighed and sounded serious and said Richard should come round at
once.

 
          
Richard
drove up to Honeycomb Cottage at eight that evening. He parked the car
carefully on hard ground in spite of his apparent exhaustion. He covered the
bonnet with newspaper before he came in to the house. He did not mean to risk
the car not starting in the morning. Liffey waved happily from the window. Last
night’s nightmares and suspicions, and the morning’s bizarre event, were
equally washed away in expectation, excitement and a sense of achievement. She
had worked hard all day, unpacking, putting up curtains, lining shelves,
chopping wood: reviving last night’s uneaten sweet-and-sour pork in the
coal-fired Aga, which, now it had stopped smoking, she knew she was going to
love. She had the hot-water system working and the bed assembled. She had
bathed and put on fresh dungarees and washed her nightshirt.

 
          
Richard
was not smiling as he came in the room. He sank in a chair. She poured him
whisky, into a warmed glass. That way the full flavour emerged.

 
          
He
was silent!

 
          
“Haven’t
I worked hard? Do say I’ve done well. You’ve no idea how I missed you. There
was such a
wind,
I was quite frightened in the night.”

 
          
Still
he did not speak. Hearing her own voice in the silence she knew it was the
voice of a child, playing bravely alone in its lighted bedroom, dark corridors
between it and parents, making up stories, speaking aloud, filling up space,
taking first one role and then the other.
Mournful,
frightened prattle.

 
          
“Did
you really stay with Bella?” She heard her own voice growing up, growing sour.
No, she begged, don’t let me. But she did. “Why didn’t you drive back last
night? You must have known I’d be miserable on my own.”

 
          
Still
silence.

 
          
“And
you hit me.”

 
          
“Do
shut up, Liffey,” said Richard in a conversational and uncondemning voice, thus
enabling her to do so. “What’s for supper?”

 
          
She
fetched out the sweet-and-sour pork. She lit the candles. They ate. It was
almost what she had dreamed, except that Richard hardly said a word.

 
          
“We
are in a mess,” said Richard over the devilled sardines she had prepared in
place of dessert. She could see that getting to the shops would be difficult.
She would have to get a telephone installed as soon as possible, if only in
order to call taxis.

 
          
“We’re
not,” said Liffey. “We’re here, aren’t we, and it’s lovely, and if you say we
have to move back to
London
I won’t make any trouble. But I would like to stay.”

 
          
Did
Liffey have Tucker in mind as she spoke?
Opening up whole new
universes of power and passion, laying instinct bare.

 
          
“We
can’t move back to
London
,” said Richard, and even as Liffey’s eyes lit up, said, “I’m going to
have to stay up in
London
during the week and come back at weekends.”

 
          
Liffey
wept. Richard explained.

 
          
“At
least until we can get something sorted out with the lawyers,” said Richard.
“Three months or so, I imagine. I can stay with Ray and Bella, on their sofa.
It won’t be very comfortable, but I can manage.”

 
          
Did
Richard have Bella in mind as he spoke, filling his black-and-white world with
rich colours of cynicism and new knowledge?

 
          
How
long since Liffey had really wept? Not, surely, during all the time she had
been married to Richard. Tears had fallen from her eyes for the plight of the
helpless, or for abused children, or forsaken wives, or for the tens of
thousands swept away by floods in far-off places, but she had not wept for
herself.

 
          
“I
don’t want to be away from you,” said Richard.
“ Do
you think I enjoy sleeping apart from you? But what else can I do?”

           
“Helen and Mory are supposed to be
our
friends
,” wept Liffey. “How can
friends behave like that?”

 
          
Richard
tried to console Liffey. He told her about army wives whose husbands were away
for months at a time, and light- housemen, and submariners on nuclear
submarines who sometimes didn’t come home for years.
And the
wives of convicts and political prisoners.

 
          
“But
those are other people,” cried Liffey. “This is
me”
Richard told Liffey how nice she’d made everything in the
cottage, and how he would look forward to coming home at the weekends, and how
absence made the heart grow fonder, and she believed him, and he believed
himself, and they went to bed, tearful but entwined; and he fell asleep, so
tired was he, before he could do more than embrace her, and in the morning both
slept through the alarm, which was set for five-thirty, so that Richard had to
leap out of bed and be gone before she could possibly speak to him.