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.’
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 up, man,’ said Mory. ‘It’s on the side of the people, now. You rich bastards are just going to have to squeal.’
Mory’s language had changed, along with his temperament. Richard remarked on it to Miss Martin, when he reached the office. He was already on the phone to his solicitor.
‘He may have been popping acid,’ remarked Miss Martin. ‘Or he may have been like that all the time. People’s true natures reveal themselves when it comes to accommodation. It’s the territorial imperative.’
The solicitor sighed and sounded serious, and said Richard should come round at once.
Richard drove up to Honeycomb Cottage at eight that evening. He parked the car carefully on hard ground, in spite of his apparent exhaustion. He covered the bonnet with newspaper before he came in to the house. He did not mean to risk the car not starting in the morning. Liffey waved happily from the window. Last night’s nightmares and suspicions, and the morning’s bizarre event, were equally washed away in expectation, excitement and a sense of achievement. She had worked hard all day, unpacking, putting up curtains, lining shelves, chopping wood: reviving last night’s uneaten sweet-and-sour-pork in the coal-fired Aga which, now it had stopped smoking, she knew she was going to love. She had the hot water system working and the bed assembled. She had bathed and put on fresh dungarees, and washed her nightshirt.
Richard was not smiling as he came in the room. He sank in a chair. She poured him whisky, into a warmed glass.
That way the full flavour emerged.
He was silent!
‘Haven’t I worked
