Puffball. Fay Weldon

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.’

       In Richard’s Life

      Richard, taking Bella’s words to heart, if not her body to his, went round to the apartment before going to work, to explain to Mory and Helen that a mistake had been made, and that he and Liffey would have to return to London. Liffey, Richard had decided, would have to put up with using Honeycomb Cottage as a weekend retreat, and he would have to put up with her paying for its rent—not an unpleasant compromise for either of them—until his verbal contract with Dick Hubbard, to take the cottage for a year, could be said to have expired. ‘Never go back on a deal just because you can,’ Richard’s father had instructed him, ‘even if it’s convenient. A man’s word is his bond. It is the basis on which all civilisation is based.’ And Richard believed him, following the precept in his private life, if not noticeably on his employers’ behalf.

      

      ‘Never let a woman pay for herself,’ his mother had said, slipping him money when he was nine, so he could pay for her coffee, and confusion had edged the words deeply into his mind. ‘Never spend beyond your income,’ she would say, ‘I never do,’ when he knew it was not true.

      Now he earnestly required Liffey to live within his income whilst turning a blind eye to the fact that they clearly did not: that avocados and strawberries and pigskin wallets belonged to the world of the senior executive, not the junior. The important thing, both realised, was to save face. She seriously took his housekeeping, and he seriously did not notice when it was all used upon one theatre outing.

      It was difficult, Richard realised on the way up the stairs, to fulfil the obligation both to Dick Hubbard and to Mory, who had been promised a pleasant apartment and who now must be disappointed. It could not, in fact, be done; and for this dereliction Richard blamed Liffey. He resolved, however, out of loyalty to a wife whom he had gladly married, to say nothing of all this to Mory.

      

      The familiar stairs reassured him; the familiar early morning smells of other people’s lives: laundry, bacon, coffee. The murmur of known voices. This was home. Three days away from it and already he was homesick. He could never feel the same for Honeycomb Cottage, although for Liffey’s sake he would have tried. Wet leaves, dank grass and a sullen sky he could persuade himself were seasonal things: but the running, erratic narrative of the apartment block would never be matched, for Richard, by the plodding, repetitive story of the seasons.

      

      I am a creature of habit, said Richard to himself.

      

      ‘I am a creature of habit!’ Richard’s mother had been accustomed to saying, snuggling into her fur coat, or her feather cushion, eyes bright and winsome, when anyone had suggested she do something new—such as providing a dish on Tuesday other than shepherd’s pie, or getting up early enough in the morning to prepare a packed lunch for Richard, or going somewhere on holiday other than Alassio, Italy. ‘I am a creature of habit!’ Perhaps, Richard thought now, one day I will understand my mother, and the sense of confusion will leave me.

      

      Richard knocked on his own front door. Helen’s sister Lally, pregnant body wrapped in her boyfriend’s donkey-jacket, opened the door. She wore no shoes. Richard, startled, asked to see Mory or Helen.

      ‘They’re asleep,’ said Lally. ‘Go away and come back later whoever you are,’ and she shut the door in his face. She was very pretty and generally fêted, and saw no need to be pleasant to strange men. She believed, moreover, that women were far too likely for their own good to defer to men, and was trying to stamp out any such tendency in herself, thus allying, most powerfully, principle to personality.

      

      Richard hammered on the door.

      ‘This is my home!’ he cried. ‘I live here.’

      Eventually Mory opened the door. Richard had not seen Mory for three months. Then he had worn a suit and tie and his hair cleared his collar. Now, pulling on jeans, hopping from foot to foot, hairy chested, long haired, he revealed himself as what Richard’s mother would describe as a hippie. ‘Don’t lose your cool, man,’ said Mory. ‘What’s the hassle?’

      ‘Is that really you?’ asked Richard, confused more by the hostility in look and tone, than by the change in Mory’s appearance, marked though it was.

      ‘So far as I know,’ said Mory, cunningly.

      

      He did not ask Richard in. On the contrary, he now quite definitely blocked the door, and Richard, who had just now seen himself as a knight errant, was conscious of a number of shadowy, barefoot creatures within, and knew that his castle had been besieged, and taken and was full of alien people, and that only force of arms would win it back.

      Richard explained. He was cautious and formal.

      ‘That’s certainly shitsville, man,’ said Mory, ‘but it was on your say-so we split, and our pad’s gone now, and what are we supposed to do, sleep on the streets to save you a train journey? Didn’t you see Lally was pregnant?’ Richard said he would go to law.

      Mory said Richard was welcome to go to law, and in three years time Richard might manage an eviction.

      ‘We’ve got the law tied