Puffball

‘If Liffey can’t have children,’ asked Annie, Richard’s secretary, ‘would you stick by her?’

‘Of course,’ said Richard immediately and stoutly. But the question increased his anxiety.

Annie read cookery books in her lunch hour, propping them in her electric typewriter. She took an easy and familiar approach to her job, and felt no deference towards anyone. She had spent a year working in the States and had lost, or so it seemed to Richard, her sense of the nuances of respect owing between man and woman, powerful and humble, employer and employed.

Her fair hair hung over the typewriter like a veil. She had a boyfriend who was a diamond merchant and one-time bodyguard to General Dayan. She had wide blue eyes, and a rounded figure. Liffey had never seen her. Once she asked Richard what Annie looked like—tentatively, because she did not want to sound possessive or jealous.

‘Fat,’ said Richard.

And because Annie had a flat, nasal telephone voice Liffey had assumed she was one of the plain, efficient girls whom large organisations are obliged to employ to make up for the pretty ones they like to keep up front.

Besides.

When Richard and Liffey married they had agreed to tell one another at once if some new emotional or physical involvement seemed likely, and Liffey believed the agreement still held.

Christmas approached, and Liffey stopped work in order to concentrate upon it, and decorate the Christmas tree properly. She had her gifts bought by the second week in December, and then spent another week wrapping and adorning. She was asked to Richard’s office party but didn’t go. She did not like his office parties. Everyone looked so ugly, except Richard, and everyone got drunk.

Liffey arranged to meet Richard at a restaurant after the party. She expected him at nine. By ten he had not arrived, so she went round to the office, in case he had had too much to drink or there had been an accident. In no sense, as she explained and explained afterwards, was she spying on him.

The office was a massive new concrete block, with a marble-lined lobby and decorative lifts. Richard’s employers were an international company, recently diversified from oil into films and food products—the latter being Richard’s division, and he a Junior Assistant Brand Manager. If it were not for Liffey’s private income, she would have had to work and earn, or else live very poorly indeed. As it was, lack of financial anxiety made Richard bold in his decisions and confident in his approach to his superiors, which was duly noted and appreciated, and boded well for his future.

Liffey went up in the lift to Richard’s office, walking through empty corridors, still rich with the after-party haze of cigarette smoke and the aroma from a hundred half-empty glasses. From behind the occasional closed door came a cry, or a giggle or a moan. Liffey found Richard behind his desk, on the floor with Annie, who was not one of the plain ones after all, just plump and luscious, and all but naked, except for veils of hair. So was Richard. Liffey went home by taxi. Richard followed after. He was maudlin drunk, sick on the step, and passed out in the hall. Liffey dragged him to bed, undressed his stubborn body and left him alone. She sat at the window staring out at the street.

She felt that she was destroyed. Everything was finished—love, trust, marriage, happiness. All over.

But of course it was not. Richard’s contrition was wonderful to behold. He begged forgiveness: he held Liffey’s hand. He pleaded, with some justification, total amnesia of the event. Someone had poured vodka into the fruit cup. It was Annie’s fault, if anyone’s. Richard loved Liffey, only Liffey. Love flowed between them again, lubricating Liffey’s passages, promoting spermatogenesis in Richard’s testes, encouraging the easy flow of seminal fluid from seminal vesicles and prostate to the entrance of the urethra, and thence, by a series of rhythmic muscular contractions, into Liffey.

Love, and none the worse for all that: but earthly love. Spiritual love, the love of God for man, and man for God, cannot be debased, as can earthly love, by such description.

Still Liffey did not get pregnant.

Annie was transferred to another office. After the annual Christmas party there was a general shifting round of secretarial staff. A stolid and respectful girl, Miss Martin, took Annie’s place. Her plumpness was not soft and natural, as was Annie’s, but solid and unwelcoming, and encased by elasticated garments. Her face was impassive, and her manner was prim; Richard was not attracted to her at all, and was relieved to find he was not. He had lately been having trouble with sudden upsurges of sexual interest in the most inappropriate people. He confided as much in Bella.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Bella, ‘you can’t be expected to stay faithful to one person all your life, just because you married them.’ Richard quite disliked Bella for a time, for giving voice to what he saw as cheap and easy cynicism. He still believed in romantic love, and was ashamed of his lapse with Annie: his sudden succumbing to animal lust. He decided that Liffey and he would see less of Bella and Ray.

Christmas Pledges

Liffey’s birthday was on Christmas Day, a fact which annoyed Madge, who was a proselytising atheist.

They were to spend Christmas with Richard’s parents. They journeyed down to Cornwall on the night of Christmas Eve: there was a hard frost. The night landscape sparkled under the moon. Richard and Liffey were drunk with love and Richard’s remorse. The back of the car was piled high with presents, beautifully wrapped and ribboned. They took with them a Thermos of good real coffee, laced with brandy, and chicken sandwiches. They went by the A 303, down past Windsor, on to the motorway, leaving at the Hungerford exit, and down through Berkshire and Wiltshire, crossing Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge stood in the moonlight, ominous and amazing, dwarfing its wire palisade. Then on into Somerset, past Glastonbury Tor, into Devon and finally over the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall.

Liffey loved Richard too much to even mention Honeycomb Cottage, although they passed within five miles of it.

Christmas Day was bright, cold, and wild. Mr and Mrs Lee-Fox’s cottage was set into the Cornish cliffs. A storm arose, and sea spray dashed against the double glazing but all was safe and warm and hospitable within. The roast turkey was magnificent, the Christmas tree charming, and Liffey’s presents proved most acceptable—two hand-made patchwork quilts, one for each twin bed. Liffey loved giving. Her mother, Madge, did not. They had once spent Christmas with Madge, rather than with Richard’s parents, and had a chilly bleak time of it. Madge liked to be working, not rejoicing.

Mr and Mrs Lee-Fox agreed, under their quilts on Christmas night, that at least Liffey kept Richard happy and lively, and at least this year had worn a T-shirt thick enough to hide her nipples.

On their way back to London they made a detour out of Glastonbury and into Crossley, and passed Dick Hubbard’s estate agency. There was room to park outside, for the Christmas holiday, stretching further and further forward to grab in the New Year, kept most of the shops and offices closed. And Dick Hubbard’s door was open. Richard stopped.

‘Townspeople,’ said Dick Hubbard, looking down from his private office on the first floor. ‘Back from the Christmas holidays, and looking for a country cottage to rent, for twopence halfpenny a week. They’re out of luck.’

He was a large, fleshy man in his late forties, at home in pubs, virile in bed; indolent. His wife had died in a riding accident shortly after his liaison with Carol had begun. Carol was smaller and slighter than her sister Mabs, but just as determined.

‘There’s Honeycomb Cottage,’ said Carol.

‘That’s for sale, not for rent. I’m holding on until prices stop rising.’

‘Then you’ll hold on for ever,’ said Carol. ‘And in the meanwhile it will all fall down. Mabs says it’s already an eyesore. She’s quite put out about it.’

‘Mabs had better not start interfering,’ said Dick, ‘or she’ll lose her grazing.’ But no one in Crossley, not even Dick Hubbard, liked to think of Mabs being put out, and when Richard and Liffey enquired about Honeycomb Cottage, they were told it was to rent on a full repairing lease for twenty pounds a week.

‘Done,’ said Richard.

‘Done,’ said Dick Hubbard.

They shook hands.

‘In the country,’ said Liffey, as they got back into the car, ‘the word of a gentleman still means something. People trust one another. You’re going to love it, Richard.’ ‘It’s certainly easy to do business,’ said Richard.

They decided to rent the London apartment to friends, and let the income from one pay for the outgoings on the other.

‘We could get thirty a week for the flat,’ said Liffey. ‘And the extra can pay for your fares.’

It was a long time since she had been anywhere by train.

After Richard and Liffey had gone, Dick Hubbard returned to his interrupted lovemaking with Carol.

‘Didn’t they even ask for a lease?’ asked Carol.

‘No,’ said Dick.

‘You’ll do all right there,’ said Carol.

‘I know,’ said Dick.

Friends

On the morning of December 30th, Liffey rang up her friend, Helen, who was married to Mory, an architect. The friendship was not of long standing. Liffey had met Helen in the waiting room of an employment agency a year ago, and struck up an acquaintance.

After the manner of young married women, still under the obligation of total loyalty to a husband, Liffey had cut loose from her school and college friends, as if fearing that their very existence might merit a rash confidence, a betrayal of her love for Richard. She made do, now, with a kind of surface intimacy with this new acquaintance or that, and since she did not offer any indication of need or distress, or any real exchange of feeling, the friendships did not ripen. Liffey did not like to display weakness: and weakness admitted is the very stuff of good friendship.

Mory and Richard had met over a dinner table or so, and discussed the black holes of space, and Richard, less acute in his social than his business relationships, thought he recognised a fellow spirit.

So now Liffey went to Helen and Mory for help.

‘Helen? Sorry to ring so early but Helen we’ve rented a most darling cottage in the country and now all we have to do is find someone for this flat and we can move out of London in a fortnight, and I was wondering if you could help?’

There was a pause.

‘How much?’ enquired Helen.

‘Richard says forty pounds a week but I think that’s greedy. Twenty would be more like it.’

‘I should think so,’ said Helen. ‘If you can’t find anyone Mory and I could take it, I suppose, to help you out.’ ‘But that would be wonderful,’ cried Liffey. ‘I’d be so grateful! You’d look after everything and it would all be safe with you.’

Liffey sorted, washed, wrapped, packed and cleaned for two weeks. Friends rather mysteriously disappeared, instead of helping. She had no idea she and Richard had accumulated so many possessions. She gave away clothes and furniture to Oxfam. She found old photographs of herself and Richard and laughed and cried at the absurdity of life. She wrapped her hair in a spotted bandana to keep out clouds of dust. She wanted everything to be nice for Helen and Mory. Charming, talented, scatty Helen. Mory, the genius architect, temporarily unemployed. Lovely to be able to help!

‘Friendship,’ Liffey said, ‘is all about helping.’

‘Um,’ said Richard. Five years ago the remark would have enchanted, not embarrassed him.

‘Don’t you think so, Bella,’ persisted Liffey, not getting the expected response from Richard.

‘I daresay,’ said Bella, politely. Ray was out visiting friends who had a sixteen-year-old daughter he was helping through a Home Economics examination. Bella was in a bad, fidgety mood. Richard knew Ray was making her unhappy and from charity had lifted the embargo on the friendship. And Bella was being very kind; the kindest, in fact, of all their friends, offering packing cases, time, concern, and showing an interest in the details of the move. Now, on the eve of their departure for the country, she gave them spaghetti bolognese. The sauce came from a can. Richard followed Bella into the kitchen. Liffey had gone to the bathroom.

‘Liffey’s a lucky little girl,’ said Bella, ‘having a husband to indulge her so.’

Bella kissed Richard full on the lips, startling him.

‘If you’re not careful,’ said Bella, ‘Liffey will still be a little girl when she’s got grey hairs and you’re an old, old man.’ She dabbed his mouth with a tissue.

‘You’re going to hate the country,’ said Bella. ‘You’re going to be so lonely.’

‘We have each other,’ said Richard.

Bella laughed.

Liffey came back from the bathroom with a long face.

‘No baby?’ asked Bella.

‘No baby,’ said Liffey. ‘I’m sorry, Richard. Once we’re in the country I’m sure it will happen.’

The removal van arrived on the morning of Wednesday, January 7th. Liffey’s period was soon to finish. She was in a progesterone phase.

Richard took the day off from work. They followed the furniture van in the car, and left the key under the mat for Mory and Helen. There was no need of a lease, or a rent book, between friends.

‘Goodbye, you horrible town,’ cried Liffey. ‘Hello country!

Nature, here we come!’ Richard wished she wouldn’t, Bella’s words in his mind. And, he rather feared, Bella’s lips. He had never thought of her as a sexual entity before. Mory and Helen moved in a couple of hours after Richard and Liffey had left. With them came Helen’s pregnant sister and her unemployed boyfriend, both of whom now had the required permanent address from which to claim Social Security benefits.

Honeycomb Cottage, in January, was perhaps colder and damper than Liffey had expected, and the rooms smaller: and the banisters had to come down before any furniture could get in, and Richard sawed the double bed in two to get it into the bedroom, but Liffey was happy, brave and positive, and by Wednesday evening had fires lit, decorative branches, however bare, in vases, and a cosy space cleared amongst chaos for a delicious celebration meal of bottled caviar, fillet steak (from Harrods), a whole pound of mushrooms between them, and champagne.

‘All this,’ marvelled Liffey, ‘and five pounds a week profit!’ She’d forgotten how much she’d asked Helen to pay, in the end. ‘You’re leaving out the fares,’ murmured Richard, but not too loud, for it was always unkind to present Liffey with too much reality all at once. Fares would amount to some thirty pounds a week. Liffey had bought a whole crate of new books—from thrillers, new novels, to heavy works on sociology and philosophy, which she intended to dole out to Richard day by day, for the improvement of his mind on the morning journey, and his diversion on the evening train—and Richard was touched.

‘It’s very quiet,’ said Richard, looking out into the blank, bleak wet night. ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do with yourself all day.’

‘I love the quietness,’ said Liffey. ‘And the solitude. Just you and me—oh, we are the most enviable of people! Everyone else just dreams, but we’ve actually done it.’

That night they slept on foam rubber in front of the fire, but did not make love, for they were exhausted. Richard wondered why someone so old and scraggy and cynical as Bella should be so attractive. Perhaps true love and sexual excitement were mutually exclusive.

Realities

On Thursday morning Liffey’s little alarm watch woke them at six. Liffey was up in a trice to make Richard’s breakfast. The hot water system was not working and there was ice in the wash basin, but he laughed bravely. Liffey had the times of the trains written out and pinned up above the mantelpiece. She tried to light the kitchen stove but the chimney was cold, and filled the room with smoke. She could not get the kettle to boil: she plugged in the toaster and all the electricity in the house fused: she could not grind the coffee beans for coffee. The transistor radio produced only crackle—clearly here it would need an aerial. Richard stopped smiling. Liffey danced and kissed and pinched and hugged, and he managed a wan smile, as he found the old candles he’d noticed in the fuse box. ‘I suppose, darling, they’d die if you took another day off work?’

‘Yes, they would,’ said Richard, longing for the warmth and shiny bright order of the office, and the solidarity of Miss Martin who never pranced or kissed, but offered him hot instant coffee in plastic mugs at orderly intervals.

Richard left the house at seven-thirty. Castle Tor station was twelve minutes’ drive away, and the train left at seven fifty-two.

‘Allow lots of time,’ said Liffey, ‘this first morning.’

Richard was delayed by the cow mire outside Cadbury Farm. The little Renault sank almost to its axles in the slime, for it had thawed overnight, and what the day before had been a hard surface now revealed its true nature. But revving and reversing freed the vehicle, though it woke the dogs, and he arrived, heart beating fast, at Castle Tor station at seven fifty. The station was closed. As he stood, open-mouthed, the fast train shot through.

Richard arrived back at Honeycomb Cottage at five minutes past eight. He stepped inside and slapped Liffey on the face, as she straightened up from lighting the fire, face blackened by soot.

Castle Tor station was closed all winter. Liffey had been reading the summer timetable. The nearest station was Taunton, on another line, twenty miles away. The journey from there to Paddington would take three hours. Six hours a day, thirty hours a week, spent sitting on a train, was clearly intolerable. And another eight hours a week spent driving to and from the station. To drive to London, on congested roads, would take even longer.

Richard hissed all this to Liffey, got back into his car, and drove off again.

Liffey cried.

‘I wonder what all that was about,’ said Tucker, putting down the field glasses.

‘Go on up and find out,’ said Mabs.

‘No, you go,’ he said.

So later in the morning Mabs put on her Wellington boots and her old brown coat with the missing buttons and paddled through the mire to Honeycomb Cottage and made herself known to Liffey as friend and neighbour.

‘Do come in,’ cried Liffey. ‘How kind of you to call! Coffee?’

Mabs looked at Liffey and knew she was a bubble of city froth, floating on the scummy surface of the sea of humanity, breakable between finger and thumb. Liffey trusted the world and Mabs despised her for it. ‘I’d rather have tea,’ said Mabs.

Liffey bent to riddle the fire and her little buttocks were tight and rounded, defined beneath stretched denim. The backside of a naughty child, not of a grown woman, who knows the power and murk that lies beneath, and shrouds herself in folds of cloth. So thought Mabs.

Liffey was a candy on the shelf of a high-class confectioner’s shop. Mabs would have her down and take her in and chew her up and suck her through, and when she had extracted every possible kind of nourishment, would spit her out, carelessly.

Liffey looked at Mabs and saw a smiling, friendly countrywoman with a motherly air and no notion at all how to make the best of herself.

Liffey was red-eyed but had forgiven Richard for hitting her. She could understand that he was upset. And it had been careless of her to have misread the train timetable. But she was confident that he would be back that evening with roses and apologies and sensible plans as to how to solve the commuting problem. And if it were in fact insoluble, then they would just have to move back into the London apartment, apologising to Mory and Helen for having inconvenienced them, and keep Honeycomb as a weekend cottage. Liffey could afford it, even if Richard couldn’t. His pride, his vision of himself as husband and provider, would perhaps have to be dented, just a little. That was all.

Nothing terrible had happened. If you were an ordinary, reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-intentioned person, nothing terrible could happen. Surely.

Liffey shivered.

‘Anything the matter?’ asked Mabs.

‘No,’ said Liffey, lying. Lying was second nature to Liffey, for Madge her mother always spoke the truth. Families tend to share out qualities amongst them, this one balancing that, and in families of two, as in the case of Madge and Liffey, the result can be absurd.

At that very moment Mory, who had brutal, concrete architectural tastes, looked round Liffey’s pretty apartment and said, ‘Christ, Liffey has awful taste!’ and then, ‘Shall we burn that?’ and Helen nodded, and Mory took a little bamboo wall shelf and snapped it between cruel, smooth, city hands and fed it into the fire so that they all felt warmer.

‘I hope Dick Hubbard’s given you a proper lease,’ said Mabs. ‘You can’t trust that man an inch.’

‘Richard sees to all that,’ said Liffey and Mabs thought, good, she’s the fool she seems.

Mabs was all kindness. She gave Liffey the names of doctors, dentist, thatcher, plumber and electrician.

‘You don’t want to let this place run down,’ she said. ‘It could be a real little love nest.’

Liffey was happy. She had found a friend in Mabs. Mabs was real and warm and direct and without affectation. In the clear light of Mabs, her former friends, the coffee-drinking, trinket-buying, theatre-going young women of her London acquaintance, seemed like mouthing wraiths.

A flurry of cloud had swept over from the direction of the Tor and left a sprinkling of thin snow, and then the wind had died as suddenly as it had sprung up, and now the day was bright and sparkling, and flung itself in through the window, so that she caught her breath at the beauty of it all. Somehow she and Richard would stay here. She knew it.

Mabs stood in the middle of her kitchen as if she were a tree grown roots, and she, Liffey, was some slender plant swaying beneath her shelter, and they were all part of the same earth, same purpose.

‘Anything the matter?’ asked Mabs again, wondering if Liffey were half-daft as well.

‘Just thinking,’ said Liffey, but there were tears in her eyes. Some benign spirit had touched her as it flew. Mabs was uneasy: her own malignity increased. The moment passed.

Mabs helped Liffey unpack and put straight, and half-envied and half-despised her for the unnecessary prodigality of everything she owned—from thick-bottomed saucepans to cashmere blankets. Money to burn, thought Mabs. Tucker would provide her with logs in winter and manure in summer: she’s the kind who never checks the price. A commission would come Mabs’ way from every tradesman she recommended. Liffey would be a useful source of income.

‘Roof needs re-doing,’ said Mabs. ‘The thatch is dried out: it becomes a real fire-risk, not to mention the insects! I’ve a cousin who’s a thatcher. He’s booked up for years but I’ll have a word with him. He owes me a favour.’

‘I’m not certain we’ll be able to stay,’ said Liffey sadly, and Mabs was alerted to danger. She saw Liffey as an ideal neighbour, controllable and malleable.

‘Why not?’ she asked.

Public tears stood in Liffey’s eyes at last, as they had not done for years. She could not help herself. The strain of moving house, imposing her will, acknowledging difficulty, and conceiving deceit, was too much for her. Mabs put a solid arm round Liffey’s small shoulders, and asked what the matter was. It was more than she ever did for her children. Liffey explained the difficulty over the train timetable.