Читать книгу Puffball - Fay Weldon - Страница 12

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.