Читать книгу Puffball - Fay Weldon - Страница 15

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.

‘Came up to see if you were all right,’ said Tucker.

‘I’m fine,’ said Liffey. She felt faint: surely because she had got up so suddenly. She leaned against the wall, heavy-lidded. She remembered her dream.

‘You don’t look it,’ said Tucker. He took her arm; she trembled.

‘How about a cup of tea?’ said Tucker. He sat squarely at the kitchen table, and waited. His house, his land, his servant. Liffey found the Earl Grey with some difficulty. Richard and she rarely drank tea.

‘It’s very weak,’ said Tucker, staring into his cup. She had not been able to find a saucer and was embarrassed.

‘It’s that kind of tea,’ said Liffey.

‘Too bad Hubby didn’t come home,’ said Tucker. ‘I wouldn’t miss coming home to you. Do you like this tea?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t,’ said Tucker. He stood up and came over to stand behind her, pinioning her arms. ‘You shouldn’t make tea like that. No one should.’

His breath came warm and familiar against her face. She did not doubt but that the business of the dream would be finished. His arms, narrowing her shoulders, were so strong there was no point in resisting them. It was his decision, not hers. She was absolved from responsibility. There was a sense of bargain in the air: not of mutual pleasure, but of his taking, her consenting. In return for her consent he offered protection from darkness, storm and fire. This is country love, thought Liffey. Richard’s is a city love: Richard’s arms are soft and coaxing, not insistent: Richard strikes a different bargain: mind calls to mind, word evolves word, response evokes response, is nothing to do with the relationship between the strong and the weak, as she was weak now, and Tucker strong upon her, upon the stone floor, her coat fortunately between her bare skin and its cold rough surface, his clothing chafing and hurting her. Tucker was powerful, she was not: here was opposite calling to opposite, rough to smooth, hard to soft, cruel to kind—as if each quality craved the dilution of its opposite, and out of the struggle to achieve it crested something new. This is the way the human race multiplies, thought Liffey, satisfied. Tucker’s way, not Richard’s way.

But Liffey’s mind, switched off as a pilot might switch off manual control in favour of automatic, cut back in again once the decision of abandonment had been made. Prudence returned, too late. This indeed, thought Liffey, is the way the human race multiples, and beat upon Tucker with helpless, hopeless fists.

It was the last day of her period. Surely she could not become pregnant at such a time? But since she had stopped taking the pill her cycle was erratic and random: what happened hardly deserved the name of ‘period’: she bled for six days at uneven intervals, that was all. Who was to say what was happening in her insides? No, surely, surely, it would be all right, must be all right; even if it wasn’t all right, she would have a termination. Richard would never know: no one would ever know.

She was worrying about nothing: worrying even as she cried out again in pleasure, or was it pain: Tucker now behind her, she on her side, held fast in his arms. They were like animals: she had not cared: now she began to: she wanted Richard. Where was Richard? If he hadn’t missed his train none of this would have happened. Richard’s fault. It could not happen again: it must not happen again: she would have to make clear to Tucker it would not happen again: so long as he understood what she was saying, peasant that he was. Even as she began to be horrified of him he finished, and whether she was satisfied or not she could not be sure. She thought so. It was certainly a matter of indifference to Tucker. He returned to the table and his cold tea. He wanted the pot filled up with boiling water. She obliged in silence, and poured more.

‘I suppose you could develop a taste for it,’ he said. ‘But I’d better be getting back to Mabs.’

He left. Liffey went back to bed, and to sleep, and the sleeping pills caught up with her and it was two in the afternoon before she woke again, and when she did, the dream of Tucker and the actuality of Tucker were confused. Had it not been for the state of her nightshirt and the grazing on her legs and the patches of abraded roughness round her mouth, she would have dismissed the experience altogether as the kind of dream a woman dreams when she sleeps alone for the first time in years. But she could not quite do that.

Liffey balanced the incident in her mind against Richard’s scuffling with his secretary at the office party, and decided that the balance of fidelity had been restored. There was no need to feel guilty. At the same time there was every reason not to let it happen again. She had the feeling Tucker would not return, at any rate not in the same way. He had marked her, that was all, and put her in her proper place. She felt sure she could rely upon his discretion. She was even relieved. Now that Richard had been paid out, she could settle down to loving him again. She felt she had perhaps been angrier with him than she had thought.

‘Well?’ enquired Mabs, when Tucker returned. The children were off on the school bus. Eddie had a bruise on his back. She had given him a note to take to his teacher saying he had a sore foot and could he be excused physical training, which was done in singlet and pants.

‘Skinny,’ complained Tucker. ‘Nothing to it.’

She pulled him down on top of her, to take the taste of Liffey out of him as soon as possible.

‘Not like you,’ said Tucker. ‘Nothing’s like you.’

‘But we’ll get the cows in her field,’ Mabs comforted herself.

‘We’ll get whatever we want,’ said Tucker. He felt the distress in her and kissed her dangerous eyes closed, in case the distress should turn to anger, and sear them all. ‘She’s just a little slut,’ said Mabs. ‘I knew she was from the way she talked. Don’t you go near her again, Tucker, or I’ll kill you.’

He thought he wouldn’t, because she might.

If he’d been a cockerel, all the same, he’d have crowed.

Taking and leaving Liffey. He liked Liffey.

Mabs asked Carol, later, if she knew what it was her mother mixed in with the mistletoe, and Carol said no, she didn’t. But whatever it was, it had got her Dick Hubbard.

‘It’s not that I believe in any of mother’s foolery,’ said Carol, ‘any more than you do. It’s just that it works. At least to get things started. It would never get a river flowing uphill—but if there’s even so much as a gentle slope down, it sure as hell can start the flood.’