Puffball

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’ 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 interpreting 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.

In Residence (#ulink_bc6c11e4-aa2a-5944-a251-917ab07fee26)

At the time that Liffey was taking her second sleeping pill Bella offered one to Richard. Bella sat on the end of his bed, which Helga the au pair had made up out of a sofa in Bella’s study. Bella wore her glasses and looked intelligent and academic, and as if she knew what she was talking about. Her legs were hairy beneath fine nylon. Richard declined the pill.

‘Liffey doesn’t believe in pills,’ he said.

‘You aren’t Liffey,’ said Bella, firmly.

Richard considered this.

‘I decide what we do,’ said Richard, ‘but I let Liffey decide what’s good for us. And taking sleeping pills isn’t, except in extreme circumstances, and by mutual decision.’ ‘Liffey isn’t here,’ Bella pointed out. ‘And it was she who decided you’d live in the country, not you.’

It was true. Liffey had edged over, suddenly and swiftly, if unconsciously, into Richard’s side of the marriage, breaking unwritten laws.

‘You don’t think Liffey misread the timetable on purpose?’ He was on the downward slopes of the mountain of despondency, enjoying the easy run down: resentments and realisations and justifications rattled along at his heels, and he welcomed them. He wanted Bella to say yes, Liffey was not only in the wrong, but wilfully in the wrong.

‘On purpose might be too strong,’ said Bella. ‘Try by accident on purpose.’

‘It’s unfair of her,’ said Richard. ‘I’ve always tried to make her happy, I really have, Bella. I’ve taken being a husband very seriously.’

‘Bully for you,’ said Bella, settling in cosily at the end of the bed, digging bony buttocks in.

‘But one expects a return. Is that unreasonable?’

‘Never say one,’ said Bella. ‘Say “I”. “One” is a class-based concept, used to justify any amount of bad behaviour.’

‘Very well,’ said Richard. ‘I expect a return. And the truth is, Liffey has shown that she doesn’t care for my comfort and convenience, only for her own. And when I look into my heart, where there used to be a kind of warm round centre, which was love for Liffey, there’s now a cold hard patch. No love for Liffey. It’s very upsetting, Bella.’

He felt that Bella had him on a pin, was a curious investigator of his painful flutterings. But it was not altogether unpleasant. A world which had been black and white was now transfused with colour: rich butterfly wings, torn but powerful, rose and fell, and rose again. To be free from love was to be free indeed.

Bella laughed.

‘Happiness! Love!’ she marvelled. ‘Years since I heard anyone talking like that. What do you mean? Neurotic need? Romantic fantasy?’

‘Something’s lost,’ he persisted. ‘Call it what you like. I’m a very simple person, Bella.’

Simple, he said. Physical, of course, was what he meant. Able to give and take pleasure, and in particular sexual pleasure. Difficult, now, not to take a marked sexual interest in Bella; she, clothed and cosy on his bed, and he, naked in it, and only the thickeness of a quilt between them. Or if not a sexual interest, certainly a feeling that the natural, ordinary thing to do was to take her in his arms so that their conversation could continue on its real level, which was without words. The very intimacy of their present situation deserved this resolution.

These feelings, more to do with a proper sense of what present circumstances required than anything more permanent, Richard interpreted both as evidence of his loss of love for Liffey, and desire for Bella, and the one reinforced the other. That, and the shock of the morning, and the evidence of Liffey’s selfishness, and the sudden fear that she was not what she seemed, and the shame of his striking her, and the exhaustion of the drive, and the stirring up of childhood griefs, had all combined to trigger off in Richard’s mind such a wave of fears and resentments and irrational beliefs as would stay with him for some time. And in the manner of spouses everywhere, he blamed his partner for his misfortunes, and held Liffey responsible for the cold patch in his heart, and the uncomfortably angry and anxious, lively and lustful thoughts in his mind: and if he did not love her any more, why then, it was Liffey’s fault that he did not.

‘All I can say,’ said Bella, ‘is that love or the lack of it is made responsible for a lot of bad behaviour everywhere; and it’s hard luck on wives if misreading a train timetable can herald the end of a marriage: but I will say on your behalf, Richard, that Liffey is very manipulative, and has an emotional and sexual age of twelve, and a rather spoilt twelve at that. You’ll just have to put your foot down and move back to London, and if Liffey wants to stay where she is, then you can visit her at weekends.’ ‘She wouldn’t like that,’ said Richard. ‘You might,’ said Bella. ‘What about you?’

Spoilt. It was a word heard frequently in Richard’s childhood.

You can’t have this: you can’t have that. You don’t want to be spoilt. Or, from his mother, I’d like you to have this but your father doesn’t want me to spoil you. So you can’t have it. It seemed to Richard, hearing Bella say ‘spoilt’ that Liffey had been the recipient of all the good things he himself had ever been denied, and he resented it, and the word, as words will, added fuel to his paranoic fire, and it burned the more splendidly.

As for Bella—who had thrown in the word half on purpose, knowing what combustible material it was—Bella knew she herself was not spoilt, and never had been. Bella had been obliged to struggle and work for what she now had, as Liffey had not, and no one had ever helped her, so why should it be different for anyone else?

Richard sat up in bed. His chest was young, broad and strong. The hairs upon it were soft and sleek, and not at all like Ray’s hairy tangle.

‘I wish I could imagine Liffey and you in bed together,’ said Bella. ‘But I can’t. Does she know what to do? Nymphet Liffey!’

Bella had gone too far: approached too quickly and too near, scratched Liffey’s image which was Richard’s alone to scratch. Whatever was in the air between herself and Richard evaporated. Bella went back to her desk, typing, and Richard lay back and closed his eyes.

The wind rose in the night: two sleeping pills could not wipe out the sound or ease the sense of danger. Liffey heard a tile fly off the roof: occasionally rain spattered against the window. She lay awake in a sleeping bag on a mattress on the floor. The double bed was still stacked in two pieces against the wall. Liffey ached, body and soul.

Liffey got up at three and went downstairs and doused the fire. Perhaps the chimneys had not been swept for years and so might catch light. Then she would surely burn to death. Smoke belched out into the room as the hot coals received the water. Liffey feared she might suffocate, but was too frightened to open the back door, for by letting out the smoke she would let the night in. When she went upstairs the night had become light and bright again; the moon was large: the Tor was framed against pale clouds, beautiful. Liffey slept, finally, and dreamt Tucker was making love to her on a beach, and waves crashed and roared and stormed and threatened her, so there was only desire, no fulfilment.

When she woke someone was hammering on the front door. It was morning. She crawled out of the sleeping bag, put on her coat, went downstairs and opened the door. It was Tucker. Liffey stepped back.

Tucker stepped inside.

Tucker was wearing his boots, over-trousers tucked into them, a torn shirt, baggy army sweater, and army combat-jacket. His hands were muddy. She did not get as far as his face.

‘Came up to see if you were all right,’ said Tucker.

‘I’m fine,’ said Liffey. She felt faint: surely because she had got up so suddenly. She leaned against the wall, heavy-lidded. She remembered her dream.

‘You don’t look it,’ said Tucker. He took her arm; she trembled.

‘How about a cup of tea?’ said Tucker. He sat squarely at the kitchen table, and waited. His house, his land, his servant. Liffey found the Earl Grey with some difficulty. Richard and she rarely drank tea.

‘It’s very weak,’ said Tucker, staring into his cup. She had not been able to find a saucer and was embarrassed.