Puffball

‘They’re very quick about it,’ she complained to Tucker.

‘I thought city folks got up to all kinds of tricks. Do you fancy her?’

‘She’s too skinny for my taste,’ said Tucker.

‘And you can do a lot better than him,’ said Mabs, returning the compliment.

‘I should hope so,’ said Tucker, and did, pushing Mabs’ old grey skirt up and reaching the oyster-coloured silk underwear beneath. She was fussy about what she wore next to her skin. She had surprisingly long and slender legs. Her bulk was contained in her middle parts. Tucker loved the way her sharp brown eyes, in the act of love, turned soft and docile, large irised, like those of his cows. The image of Liffey stayed in his mind, as Mabs had intended it should, and helped. Mabs made good use of everything that came her way, and Tucker did, too.

‘If you would have a baby,’ said Richard to Liffey, as they lay in the long grass, the late sun striking low across the land, ‘there’d be some point in living in the country.’ Liffey did not want a baby, or at any rate not now. She might be chronologically twenty-eight, but felt eighteen, and eighteen was too young to have a baby.

Liffey looked at Honeycomb Cottage. Generations of happy, healthy children, she thought, had skipped in and out of the door, along the path, under roses and between hollyhocks. There, loving couples had grown old in peace and tranquillity, at one with the rhythms of nature. Here she and Richard would be safe, out of the city which already had turned a few of his dark hairs grey, and was turning his interest away from her, and which threatened her daily with its pollutants and violence; the city: where there was a rapist round every corner, and rudeness at every turn, and an artificiality of life and manners which sickened her.

‘All right,’ said Liffey, ‘let’s have a baby.’

Panic rose in her throat, even as she spoke.

‘All right,’ said Richard, ‘let’s live in the country.’

He regretted it at once.

Mabs was in the yard of Cadbury Farm as Richard and Liffey drove back towards the main road along the bumpy track that passed both cottage and farm. Richard had to stop the car while Tucker drove his cows in. Mangy dogs strained and barked at the end of chains, and were yelled into silence by Mabs. She bent to give them bones and her rump was broad.

‘So long as you don’t ever let yourself go,’ added Richard, and then Mabs stood straight and smiled full at Richard and Liffey. She was formless and shapeless in her old grey skirt and her husband’s shirt. Her hair was ratty, she had unplucked whiskers on her double chin, and she weighed all of thirteen stone. But she was tall and strong and powerful, and her skin was creamy white.

‘She looks like a horse,’ said Liffey. ‘Do you ever see me looking like a horse?’

‘You’d better not,’ said Richard, ‘or we’ll move straight back to town.’

Richard did not believe that Liffey, if offered the country, would actually want to live there. He believed he had called her bluff—which had begun to irritate him—and brought her a little nearer to having a baby, and that was all. He was realistic where Liffey was romantic, and trained, as business executives ought to be, in the arts of manipulation.

‘Mind you,’ said Liffey, ‘horses are very friendly. There are worse things to be.’

Liffey, as horse, came from the Viennese stables. She tossed her head and neighed and pranced, precisely and correctly. She was trained in the arts of child-wifedom. Mabs, as horse, was a working dray—Tucker mounted her easily. She galloped and galloped and sweated and brayed, and what price breeding then? Who needed it? But how was Liffey to know a thing like that? Liffey never sweated, never brayed. Liffey made a sweet little mewling sound, as soon as she possibly could yet still carried conviction; a dear and familiar sound to Richard, for what their lovemaking might lack in quality was certainly made up for in frequency. Liffey felt that the act of copulation was a strange way to demonstrate the act of love, but did her best with it.

Tucker’s cows moved on. Richard and Liffey left.

‘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.

Inside Liffey (I) (#ulink_f3bfb883-c834-51fe-a97a-3096e395d58d)

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 rôle 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 their vision of the world is conditioned by their hormonal state: that no one else is truly at fault, except that believing it makes them 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 which 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—i.e. 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 damped 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.

Holding Back (#ulink_2860782e-28ab-50e9-aa45-a15e30ca8491)

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 which 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.