Puffball

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 rôle, 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.