her. So she wrote, in her spare time, poems and paragraphs, and ideas, and even short stories. She showed what she wrote to nobody, not even to Richard, but felt a certain sense of progress and achievement for having done it.
‘You’d be bored to death,’ said Richard, meaning that he feared that he would.
‘You have your career and your fulfilment,’ persisted Liffey, ‘and what do I have? Why should your wishes be more important than mine?’
Why indeed? Richard could not even cite his money earning capacity in his defence, since Liffey had a small fortune of her own, left to her by a grandfather. And he had of late become very conscious of the communal guilt which the male sex appears to bear in relation to women. All the same, Liffey’s words rang fashionable and hollow in the silence he allowed to follow them.
He made love to her again. Moral confusion excited him sexually—or at any rate presented itself as a way out of difficulty, giving him time to think, and a generally agreeable time at that.
‘She’s just a farmyard animal like any other,’ said Tucker handing over the glasses to Mabs.
‘Women aren’t animals,’ said Mabs.
‘Yes, they are,’ said Tucker, ‘tamed for the convenience of men.’
Mabs put down her glasses and looked malevolently at her husband, frightening him into silence. Then she turned back to Liffey and Richard and watched some more.
‘They’re very quick about it,’ she complained to Tucker.
‘I thought city folks got up to all kinds of tricks. Do you fancy her?’
‘She’s too skinny for my taste,’ said Tucker.
‘And you can do a lot better than him,’ said Mabs, returning the compliment.
‘I should hope so,’ said Tucker, and did, pushing Mabs’ old grey skirt up and reaching the oyster-coloured silk underwear beneath. She was fussy about what she wore next to her skin. She had surprisingly long and slender legs. Her bulk was contained in her middle parts. Tucker loved the way her sharp brown eyes, in the act of love, turned soft and docile, large irised, like those of his cows. The image of Liffey stayed in his mind, as Mabs had intended it should, and helped. Mabs made good use of everything that came her way, and Tucker did, too.
‘If you would have a baby,’ said Richard to Liffey, as they lay in the long grass, the late sun striking low across the land, ‘there’d be some point in living in the country.’ Liffey did not want a baby, or at any rate not now. She might be chronologically twenty-eight, but felt eighteen, and eighteen was too young to have a baby.
Liffey looked at Honeycomb Cottage. Generations of happy, healthy children, she thought, had skipped in and out of the door, along the path, under roses and between hollyhocks. There, loving couples had grown old in peace and tranquillity, at one with the rhythms of nature. Here she and Richard would be safe, out of the city which already had turned a few of his dark hairs grey, and was turning his interest away from her, and which threatened her daily with its pollutants and violence; the city: where there was a rapist round every corner, and rudeness at every turn, and an artificiality of life and manners which sickened her.
‘All right,’ said Liffey, ‘let’s have a baby.’
Panic rose in her throat, even as she spoke.
‘All right,’ said Richard, ‘let’s live in the country.’
He regretted it at once.
Mabs was in the yard of Cadbury Farm as Richard and Liffey drove back towards the main road along the bumpy track that passed both cottage and farm. Richard had to stop the car while Tucker drove his cows in. Mangy dogs strained and barked at the end of chains, and were yelled into silence by Mabs. She bent to give them bones and her rump was broad.
‘So long as you don’t ever let yourself go,’ added Richard, and then Mabs stood straight and smiled full at Richard and Liffey. She was formless and shapeless in her old grey skirt and her husband’s shirt. Her hair was ratty, she had unplucked whiskers on her double chin, and she weighed all of thirteen stone. But she was tall and strong and powerful, and her skin was creamy white.
‘She looks like a horse,’ said Liffey. ‘Do you ever see me looking like a horse?’
‘You’d better not,’ said Richard, ‘or we’ll move straight back to town.’
Richard did not believe that Liffey, if offered the country, would actually want to live there. He believed he had called her bluff—which had begun to irritate him—and brought her a little nearer to having a baby, and that was all. He was realistic where Liffey was romantic, and trained, as business executives ought to be, in the arts of manipulation.
‘Mind you,’ said Liffey, ‘horses are very friendly. There are worse things to be.’
Liffey, as horse, came from the Viennese stables. She tossed her head and neighed and pranced, precisely and correctly. She was trained in the arts of child-wifedom. Mabs, as horse, was a working dray—Tucker mounted her easily. She galloped and galloped and sweated and brayed, and what price breeding then? Who needed it? But how was Liffey to know a thing like that? Liffey never sweated, never brayed. Liffey made a sweet little mewling sound, as soon as she possibly could yet still carried conviction; a dear and familiar sound to Richard, for what their lovemaking might lack in quality was certainly made up for in frequency. Liffey felt that the act of copulation was a strange way to demonstrate the act of love, but did her best with it.
Tucker’s cows moved on. Richard and Liffey left.
‘They’ll be back,’ said Mabs to Tucker. He believed her. She seemed to have a hot line to the future, and he wished she did not. She had a reputation of being a witch, and Tucker feared it might be justified.
‘We don’t want city folk down Honeycomb,’ protested Tucker.
‘They might be useful,’ said Mabs, vaguely. Glastonbury Tor was dark and rose sharply out of a reddish, fading sky. She smiled at the hill as if it were a friend, and made Tucker still more uneasy.
There was an outer Liffey, arrived at twenty-eight with boyish body and tiny breasts, with a love of bright, striped football sweaters and tight jeans, and a determination to be positive and happy. Outer Liffey, with her fluttery smiley eyes, sweet curvy face, dark curly hair, and white smooth skin. And there was inner Liffey, cosmic Liffey, hormones buzzing; heart beating, blood surging, pawn in nature’s game.
She put on scent, thrust out her chest, silhouetted her buttocks
