Puffball

‘He’ll just have to stay up in London all week and come back home weekends. Lots of them round here do that,’ said Mabs.

Liffey had not spent a single night apart from Richard since the day she married him, and was proud of her record. She said as much, and Mabs felt a stab of annoyance, but it did not show on her face, and Liffey continued to feel trusting. ‘Lots of wives would say that cramped their style,’ said Mabs.

‘Not me,’ said Liffey. ‘I’m not that sort of person at all. I’m a one-woman man. I mean to stay faithful to Richard all my life. Marriage is for better or worse, isn’t it.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mabs, politely. ‘Let’s hope your Richard feels the same.’

‘Of course he does,’ said Liffey stoutly. ‘I know accidents can happen. People get drunk and don’t know what they’re doing. But he’d never be unfaithful; not properly unfaithful. And nor would I, ever, ever, ever.’

Mabs spent a busy morning. She went up to her mother and begged a small jar of oil of mistletoe and a few drops of the special potion, the ingredients of which her mother would never disclose, and went home and baked some scones, and took them up to Liffey as a neighbourly gesture and when Tucker came home to his midday meal told him to get up to Liffey as soon as possible.

‘What for?’ asked Tucker.

‘You know what for,’ said Mabs. She was grim and excited all at once. Liffey was to be proved a slut, like any other. Tucker was to do it, and at Mabs’ behest, rather than on his own initiative, sometime later.

‘You know you don’t really want me to,’ said Tucker, alarmed, but excited too.

‘I don’t want her going back to London and leaving that cottage empty for Dick Hubbard to sell,’ said Mabs, searching for reasons. ‘And I want her side of the field for grazing, and I want her taken down a peg or two, so you get up there, Tucker.’

‘Supposing she makes trouble,’ said Tucker. ‘Supposing she’s difficult.’

‘She won’t be,’ said Mabs, ‘but if she is bring her down for a cup of coffee so we all get to know each other better.’

‘You won’t put anything in her coffee,’ said Tucker, suspiciously. ‘I’m a good enough man without, aren’t I?’ Mabs looked him up and down. He was small but he was wiry; the muscles stood out on his wrists: his mouth was sensuous and his nostrils flared.

‘You’re good enough without,’ she said. But in Mabs’ world men were managed, not relied upon, and were seldom told more than partial truths. And women were to be controlled, especially young women who might cause trouble, living on the borders of the land, and a channel made through them, the better to do it. Tucker, her implement, would make the channel.

‘I’ll go this evening,’ he said, delaying for no more reason than that he was busy hedging in the afternoon, and although he was annoyed, he stuck to it.

Liffey ate Mabs’ scones for lunch. They were very heavy, and gave her indigestion.

A little black cat wandered into the kitchen, during the afternoon. Liffey knew she was female. She rubbed her back against Liffey’s leg, and meowed, and looked subjugated, tender and grateful all at once. She rolled over on her back and yowled. She wanted a mate. Liffey had no doubt of it: she recognised something of herself in the cat, which was hardly more than a kitten and too young to safely have kittens of her own. Liffey gave her milk and tinned salmon. During the afternoon the cat sat in the garden and toms gathered in the bushes and set up their yearning yowls, and Liffey felt so involved and embarrassed that she went and lay down on her mattress on the floor, which was the only bed she had, and her own breath came in short, quick gasps, and she stretched her arms and knew she wanted something, someone, and assumed it was Richard, the only lover she had ever had, or ever—until that moment—hoped to have. Gradually the excitement, if that was what it was, died. The little cat came in; she seemed in pain. She complained, she rolled about, she seemed talkative and pleased with herself.

Farmyards, thought Liffey. Surely human beings are more than farmyard animals? Don’t we have poetry, and paintings, and great civilisations and history? Or is it only men who have these things? Not women. She felt, for the first time in her life, at the mercy of her body.

Richard, four hours late at the office, had to fit his morning’s work into the afternoon, remake appointments, and rearrange meetings. It became obvious that he would have to work late. His anger with Liffey was extreme: he felt no remorse for having hit her. Wherever he looked, whatever he remembered, he found justification for himself in her bad behaviour. Old injuries, old traumas, made themselves disturbingly felt. At fifteen, he had struck his father for upsetting his mother: he felt again the same sense of rage, churned up with love, and the undercurrent of sadistic power, and the terrible knowledge of victory won. And once his mother had sent off the wrong forms at the wrong time and Richard had failed as a result to get a university place. Or so he chose to think, blaming his mother for not making his path through life smooth, recognising the hostility behind the deed, as now he blamed Liffey, recognising her antagonism towards his work. It was as if during the angry drive to the office a trapdoor had opened up, which hitherto had divided his conscious, kindly, careful self from the tumult, anger and confusion below, and the silt and sludge now surged up to overwhelm him. He asked Miss Martin to send a telegram to Liffey saying he would not be home that night.

Miss Martin raised her eyes to his for the first time. They were calm, shrewd, gentle eyes. Miss Martin would never have misread a train timetable.

‘Oh Mr Lee-Fox,’ said Miss Martin. ‘You have got yourself into a pickle!’

Farmyards

Mabs’ children came home on the school bus. Other children wore orange armbands, provided by the school in the interests of road safety. But not Mabs’ children. ‘I’m not sewing those things on. If they’re daft enough to get run over they’re better dead. Isn’t that so, Tucker?’

Today the children carried a telegram for Liffey. Mrs Harris, who ran the sub post-office in Crossley had asked them to take it up to Honeycomb Cottage. They gave it instead to Mabs, who steamed the enevelope open, and read the contents, more for confirmation than information, for Mrs Harris had told the children, who told Mabs, that Richard would not be coming home that night. He was staying with Bella, instead.

Bella? Who was Bella? Sister, mistress, friend?

Tucker consented to take the telegram up to Liffey. No sooner had he gone than Mabs began to wish he had stayed. She became irritable, and gave the children a hard time along with their tea. She chivvied Audrey into burning the bacon, slapped Eddie for picking up the burnt bits with his fingers, made Kevin eat the half-cooked fatty bits so that he was sick, and then made Debbie and Tracy wipe Kevin’s sick up. But it was done: they were fed. All were already having trouble with their digestions, and would for the rest of their lives.

When Mabs was pregnant she was kinder and slower, but Kevin, the youngest, was four, and had never known her at her best. He was the most depressed, but least confused.

Liffey, wearing rubber gloves and dark glasses as well as four woollies, opened the door to Tucker. She knew from his demeanour that he had not come to deliver telegrams, or to mend fuses (although he did this for her, later) but to bed her if he could. The possibility that he might, the intention that he should, hung in the air between them. He did not touch her, yet the glands on either side of her vaginal entrance responded to sexual stimulation—as such glands do, without so much as a touch or a caress being needed—by a dramatic increase in their secretions.

Like the little black cat on heat, thought Liffey. Horrible! She made no connection between her response and Mabs’ scones, with their dose of mistletoe and something else. How could she?

I am not a nice girl at all, thought Liffey. No. All that is required of me is the time, the place, and the opportunity: a willing stranger at the door unlikely to reproach me; and dreams of fidelity and notions of virtue and prospects of permanence fly out the window as he steps in the door.

Love is the packet, thought Liffey, that lust is sent in, and the ribbons are quickly untied.

If I step back, thought Liffey, this man will step in after me and that will be that.

Come in, come in, Liffey’s whole body sang, but a voice from Madge answered back, ‘Wanting is not doing, Liffey. Almost nothing you can’t do without.’

Liffey did not step back. She did not smile at Tucker. But her breath came rapidly.

Tucker introduced himself. Farmer, Neighbour. Mabs’ husband. Owner of the field where the black and white cows grazed. Kicker of puffballs. Liffey remembered him now, by his steel-capped boots. She remained formal, and friendly. But Tucker knew, and knew that she knew, what there could be, was to be, between them.

Tucker handed over the telegram.

‘My husband can’t get back this evening,’ said Liffey, brightly and briskly, reading it. She knew better than to betray emotion at such a time. But she minded very much.

A fighter plane zoomed over the Tor, startling both, and was gone. Tucker Pierce smiled at Liffey. Liffey’s eyelids drooped as other parts of her contracted, in automatic beat. Oh, little black cat, squirming over the cool ground, the better to put out the fire within! Tucker moved closer. Liffey stood her ground, chanting an inner incantation, of nonsense and aspiration mixed. Richard, I love you, Richard, I am spirit, not animal: Tucker, in the name of love, in the name of God, in the name of Richard, flawed and imperfect as he is; Tucker, stay where you are.

Tucker stayed; Tucker talked, still on the step.

‘Come the spring,’ said Tucker, ‘you’ll be wanting our cows in your field. Keep the grass and the thistles down.’ ‘Not to mention the docks,’ said Tucker. ‘Docks can be a terrible nuisance.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ said Tucker. ‘We’re neighbours, after all.’

‘Any little bits and pieces you need doing,’ said Tucker. ‘Just ask.’

‘Looks cosy in there,’ said Tucker, peering over Liffey’s shoulder into the colourful warmth within. ‘I see you’ve a way with rooms: making them look nice, feminine like.’

And indeed Liffey had: tacking up a piece of fabric here, a bunch of dried flowers there. She adorned rooms as she hesitated to adorn herself. She loved silks and velvets and rich embroideries and plump cushions and old, faded colours.

Tucker looked longingly within. Liffey stood her ground. ‘Come on down to the farm,’ said Tucker, remembering Mabs’ instructions, ‘and have a cup of coffee with Mabs.’ ‘Mabs is always glad of company,’ lied Tucker. ‘One thing to be on your own when you expect it,’ observed Tucker, with truth. ‘Quite another when you don’t. You’ll be feeling lonely, I dare say.’

‘Not really,’ said Liffey, with as much conviction as she could muster. ‘But I’d be glad to use your telephone, if I could.’

They walked down together, along the rutted track. Tucker Pierce, farmer, married, father of five, muddy-booted, dirty-handed, coarse-featured, but smiling, confident and easy, secure in his rights and expectations. And little Liffey, feeling vulnerable and flimsy, a pawn on someone else’s chessboard, not the Queen. She saw herself through Tucker’s eyes. She saw that her frayed jeans could represent poverty as well as universal brotherhood, and skinniness malnutrition, rather than the calculated reward of a high protein, low calorie diet.

Liffey had to run to keep up with Tucker. Her country shoes, so absurdly stout in London, appeared flimsy here, while his clumsy boots moved easily over the hollows and chasms of the rutted path.

‘It’s quiet up here,’ said Tucker, turning to her.

Not here, she thought, not here in the open, like an animal: and then, not here, not anywhere, never!

Liffey rang Richard’s office from the cold hall of Cadbury Farm. Miss Martin said Richard was not available, having gone to a meeting at an outside advertising agency, and she did not expect him back.

‘Didn’t he leave a message?’

‘No.’

Liffey rang Bella and the au pair girl Helga answered.

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

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.