Puffball, p.10
Puffball, page 10
During Saturday night Liffey’s pains returned, and when Richard moved his hand on to her breast, speculatively, she pushed it gently away. Liffey was worried. She thought it might have something to do with Tucker. Perhaps the introjection of his body into hers, so foreign to it, had started up some sinister chain of reaction? She worried for Richard’s sake, in case something disagreeable of Tucker passed itself on to him, through her. It was nothing so crude as the fear of a venereal disease, but of something more subtle—a general degeneration from what was higher to what was lower. Tucker was mire and swamp; Richard a clean, clear grassy bank of repose. The mire lapped higher and higher. It was her fault.
Richard let his hand lie: they drifted off to sleep. Richard, to his shame, dreamt of Bella, and in the morning did not pursue his amorous inclination towards Liffey, but cleared damp leaves from the paths around the cottage, and missed his Sunday paper and the droney communal somnolence of the city Sabbath, and said nothing. The countryside did not soothe him. He felt it was not so much dreaming, as waiting. Its silence, broken only by a few brave winter birds, made him conscious of the beating of his breast, the stream of his own blood, and his mortal vulnerability. He could not understand why Liffey loved it so.
Mabs came over in the afternoon with home-made mayflower wine for Richard—which she claimed was unlucky for women to imbibe—and a dark, rich, sweet elderberry wine to soothe Liffey’s insides.
‘I don’t know how you knew about my tummy,’ said Liffey, gratefully sipping, and Richard wondered, too, how Mabs could know. Then they both forgot about it, as people will, when the penalty of unravelling truth is extreme.
Mabs carried Richard’s wine in a brown carrier bag, and the bottle was wrapped for safety in old magazines, which, inspected when Mabs left, turned out to be crudely pornographic. Liffey’s little nose crinkled in mirthful disgust.
‘Aren’t people funny!’ she said, sipping the sweet elderberry wine, which indeed soothed her tummy, and contained a drop or two of a foxglove potion with which Mabs’ mother had dosed her daughters in their early adolescence, to keep them out of trouble. ‘The things they have to do to get turned on.’
The thought came to Richard, after several glasses of the mayflower wine, which was dry, clear and heady, and contained the same mistletoe distillation which Carol put in Dick Hubbard’s brandy and soda, that Liffey had never in fact been properly turned on herself, that her lovemaking was altogether too light and loving and childish—a reflection, in fact, of herself—and that though he loved and cherished her, in fact because he loved and cherished her, he could never through her discover what lay in himself. The thought was quite clear, quite dispassionate, and final.
Richard put his arms round Liffey, but she moved away from him. Mayflower and elderberry do not mix—they belong to different seasons. They do not understand each other: any more than do foxglove and mistletoe, the one of the earth, the other of the air.
Carol was the next to call.
‘Well,’ said Richard to Liffey, ‘at least you’ll never be lonely here.’ He thought that Carol looked at him with direct invitation, as she warned them not to spend too much on the house, as it would never be anything but damp, not to bother to try and grow vegetables, as the soil was poor, and to leave the roof alone, as it was so old that interference by builders would only make it worse.
It seemed to Richard that what Carol was saying, in effect, was that time and money spent on things was wasted: energy should be preserved for sexual matters. That the highest good was the union of male and female, and had Liffey not been in the room, and some scraps of discretion left to him, he would most certainly have made a sexual advance towards her.
Carol’s lips mouthed words about damp-courses, potatoes and thatch but her eyes said come into me, and he could feel the warmth of her body even across the room, and it seemed to him that all the ingenuities and activities of the human race, and all its institutions—state, church, army and bureaucracy—could be read as the merest posturing; diversion from the real preoccupation of mankind, the heady desire of the male to be into the female, and the female to be entered by the male. He had another glass of mayflower wine. Liffey looked at him anxiously. He was flushed.
When Carol had gone, he kissed Liffey chastely on the brow.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, puzzled.
‘I’m glad I married you,’ he said.
For those very qualities in Liffey which earlier in the day had seemed his undoing, he could now see as God-given.
Richard wanted Liffey to be the mother of his children. He wanted her, for that reason, to be separated out from the rest of humanity. He wanted her to be above that sexual morass in which he, as male, could find his proper place but she, as wife and mother, could not. He wanted her to be pure, to submit to his sexual advances, rather than enjoy them: and thus, as a sacred vessel, sanctified by his love, adoration and respect, to deliver his children unsullied into the world. It was for this reason that he had offered her all his worldly goods, laying them down upon the altar of her purity, her sweet smile. And he wanted other women, low women, whom he could despise and enjoy, to define the limits of his depravity and his senses, and thus explain the nature of his being, and his place in the universe.
Richard wanted Bella. Richard wanted anyone, everyone.
Except Liffey.
Richard sat rooted in his chair.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Liffey, but he would not, could not speak, and presently said he would have to go back to London that night, instead of the next morning, which upset her and made her cry, but could not be helped. These cataclysmic truths had in some way to be properly registered in his mind through his actions, lest they become vague and be forgotten, washed away by the slow, slight, sure tides of habit and previous custom.
‘Now have a good week,’ Richard said, kissing Liffey goodbye. ‘And look after yourself, and prune the roses round the door, and by this time next year we’ll have a baby, won’t we!’ His breath smelt of mayflower wine, and she, redolent of its opposing elderberry, could not help but be a little pleased that there had been no opportunity for lovemaking that weekend.
‘You didn’t put anything in that wine, I hope,’ said Tucker to Mabs.
‘Why should I do a thing like that?’ asked Mabs. ‘None of that stuff works, in any case. Or only on people who’re stupid enough to believe in it.’
‘You can’t change people,’ said Audrey, Mabs’ oldest daughter, listening when she had no business to. ‘But you can make them more themselves.’
‘What do you know about it, Miss?’ Mabs was angry, and surprised that one of her children should have a view of the world and contribute it to the household.
‘Only what Gran tells me,’ said Audrey, putting a table between herself and Mabs. She had her father’s protection, but that only made her the more nervous of her mother.
Mabs looked at Audrey and saw that all of a sudden she was a young woman with rounded hips and a bosom, and Mabs’ raised fist fell as she felt for the first time the power of the growing daughter, sapping the erotic strength of the mother. She was quiet for a time, and felt the more pleased, presently, that she had dosed Liffey to keep her off Tucker, and Tucker off her; and dosed Richard so that he should pay Liffey out properly while away during the week; and hoped again that she herself was pregnant, and still young.
Solitude
During the next week the wind turned to the north and rattled through the cottage windows, and the sky was grey and heavy, and the Tor hidden by cloud and mist.
Liffey cleaned and painted and patched and repaired by day, and shivered by night. She came to know the pattern of wind and rain around the house, as she lay in bed listening, hearing the wainscot rustle with mice, and the thatch with restless birds, and further away the hoot of an owl or the bark of a fox, and when all these noises for once were stilled, the tone shifts in the silence itself, as if the night were breathing. Once she heard music, faintly, on the wind, and was surprised to remember that the night world had people in it, too.
Liffey was lonely.
Liffey admitted defeat in her heart, and that she had been wrong, and not known what she had wanted, like a child, and not cared what Richard had wanted, like an unhappy child: and wanted Richard back the sooner to apologise. As soon as Mory and Helen were disposed of, she would join Richard in London.
Liffey walked to the Poldyke pub one evening, in search of companionship, and the host of friendly young couples whom she had come to believe inhabited every corner of the world, but found instead only old men drinking cider who stared at her in an unfriendly way. She walked back home in the dark, stumbling and groping, without a torch, having forgotten how black the night could be. Wet trees behind her whispered and gathered.
Liffey was frightened.
Mabs came up once or twice for coffee and a chat, and Liffey was grateful.
Liffey wrote a change-of-address letter to her mother. It did not mention loneliness or fear, merely hopes fulfilled and desires gratified. She had always found it difficult and dangerous to confide in her mother, and was accustomed to prattling on, instead, filling silence as now she filled the space on the page. Madge read the letter and recognised its insincerity and screwed it up and put it in the fire, and thereafter had no record of her daughter’s new address.
Liffey walked to the telephone box at Poldyke to call friends, but once there lacked the courage to put in coins, and speak. It seemed as if she were having to pay for friendship, and she was humiliated. She walked home over the icy stubble of the fields and in the shadow of herself that the low sun cast in front of her, perceived a truth about herself.
She was someone shadowy, inhabiting a world of shadows. She had not allowed the world to be real. She had been accustomed to sitting beside a telephone, and summoning friends up out of nothingness, dialling them into existence, consigning them to oblivion again, putting the receiver down when they had served their purpose. She had no friends. How could she have friends, who had never really believed that other people were real? It was her punishment.
And if Mory and Helen were real, not cut-out figures set up by Liffey in the play of her life, to flail about for a time in front of paper sets, then perhaps they could not be manoeuvred and manipulated: perhaps they could not be got rid of.
Liffey cried.
She wondered whether Richard was real, and whether she wanted him to be real. Her life since she had left her mother’s house had been a dream. And still her mother would not write to her. Perhaps, thought Liffey, I am as unreal to my mother as everyone except her is unreal to me. A child might very well seem unreal to the mother. Something dreamed up, clothed in flesh and blood, which sucked and gnawed and depleted.
Liffey cried some more.
The north wind grew stronger and came through the missing roof tiles in sudden cold gusts.
Liffey walked to Poldyke again and made herself telephone friends and talk and invite them down, but they were all too busy to talk much, or thought the winter too cold to come and stay, and though all were polite and friendly, Liffey sensed the displeasure of those who remain, towards the one who had wilfully absented herself: and marvelled at how out of sight could so quickly become out of mind, not from carelessness or malice, but from a desire to preserve self-esteem.
Liffey ran out of butter and walked all the way into Poldyke again, and saw six tins of loganberries on Mrs Harris’ shelf, and loving tinned loganberries, bought all six, thus leaving none for Mrs Harris’ other customers, and nearly breaking her arm as she carried loganberries and butter back.
Liffey thought, I must get back to civilisation quickly.
Liffey rang Richard from Cadbury Farm to tell him all these things, but Miss Martin who answered said Richard was in a meeting, and would not fetch him out of it.
The grey sky groaned and heaved: dark, lonely days drifted into darker, lonely nights. Liffey wanted Richard again. She dreamed he was making love to her and she cried when she woke.
There was no sign of Tucker.
Inside Liffey (4)
Although all was not well without, all was very well within. Liffey’s uterus had settled down nicely after its recent state of confusion. It lay like an inverted pear, settling upon the upper end of her vagina, narrowing into the cervical canal, finished off (where in a pear the stalk would be) by the cervix itself. This, on a good day, could be detected by Richard’s engorged penis as a hard knob, and by a doctor’s hand as a firm, dome-shaped structure. The walls of Liffey’s uterus were some half an inch thick, and composed of a whole network of muscles, some up and down, some oblique, some spiral, all extraordinarily flexible, and all involuntary—that is, uncontrollable by the conscious Liffey. The blood supply, simple, ample and good, came from the main blood vessels in Liffey’s pelvis; and the nerve supply, anything but simple, enabling as it did the muscle to contract rhythmically during menstruation and more dramatically during labour, would only send messages of discomfort when uncomfortably stretched. These nerves could be cut or burned or ulcerated and Liffey would be none the wiser.
Now, as the fifty-first of Liffey’s potential ova for the month ripened, the walls of the uterus lined themselves richly and healthily in preparation for its fall and fertilisation. Liffey’s fallopian tubes (the pair of ducts attached to the outer corners of the uterus) waited too, secreting from their own mucous membrane the substances which nourished all visiting sperm, and, more rarely, any fertilised ovum. Of the four hundred million sperms which Tucker had released into Liffey the week before, on the sixth day of her cycle, some forty million had reached her cervical canal, but only a few dozen had survived the quick, forty-five minute journey up the uterus and along the fallopian tube. Here, in spite of the warm, sugary, gently alkaline environment which did its best to preserve and nurture them—and Tucker’s were good strong sperm—all had inevitably perished, since no ovum arrived within the forty-eight hours of their life span. All died, but surely, surely, some molecular vestige of Tucker remained within Liffey?
One way or another, like it or not, we are part of more people than we imagine: one flesh.
Be that as it may, on the fourteenth day of Liffey’s cycle, now nicely re-established at twenty-eight days, an ovum released by Liffey’s left ovary, and swept up by the fimbriae, the little fingers of tissue where the fallopian tubes curl round to meet the ovary, swam into the healthy canal of the tube itself.
Ins and Outs
Liffey knew nothing of all this. She gave these matters even less attention than a car driver might give to his car. All she knew was that it was Friday night, and that she was looking forward to Richard’s return: that dinner was cooked, candles lit, and everything in order. She wore a swirly skirt, a blouse instead of a T-shirt, and scent. Everything in fact was ready and prepared—an outer symbol of an inward state.
In the conscious and the unconscious world alike, this is the pattern. Things are made ready, offerings are prepared, fulfilment is hoped for, and sometimes occurs. The cosmic soup prepares for life, birds prepare nests, men prepare for war, wombs prepare linings, priests are prepared for ordination. Friday washing and ironing prepares for Saturday Sabbath. It was not surprising, then, that Liffey prepared for Richard, and found pleasure in it.
Things get ready, then burst into life. Nature, like its subsidiary processes of love, and friendship, and learning, proceeds by halts and starts.
Reverently, Richard made love to Liffey. She found him gentler and more considerate than ever, and although this should have gratified her, she found it oddly irritating.
Richard was not gentle with Bella, nor had been with the motorway whore he had picked up on the journey away from Liffey, back to London, the previous Sunday night. They were the users-up of surplus seed, not of intended seed; they were instruments of his anger, inasmuch as a man who has conscientiously decided to respect and adore his wife, to project rather than to incorporate his resentment of her—must find something to do with his anger, and the erect penis can be used to punish and destroy, as well as to love and create. So can soft words.
These were the five women Richard had made love to, since his adolescence. Mary Taylor, a forty-year-old barmaid, whose habit and pleasure it was to seduce sixth-form boys from the local boarding school.
Liffey, his wife.
His secretary, on the occasion of a drunken office party. Bella Nash, his friend and landlady and best friend’s wife. Debbie, a fifteen-year-old delinquent, who travelled the motorways.
His encounter with Debbie of the unknown last name, precipitated by fate and the emotional tumult brought about by sudden self-knowledge—or else a physical irritation induced by Mabs’ mistletoe and mayflower—and his on the whole unvoiced resentment of Liffey’s recent behaviour, had gratified and satisfied him. To use, pay, and forget a more than willing girl hurt, so far as he could see, no one. It did not interfere with his uxorious love of Liffey, his more complex and imaginative lust for Bella, or his work.
