help herself? Why should she? It was her rôle in the mating dance, and Liffey danced on, as others do, long after the music stopped.
Liffey had lately been cross with Richard. Bad-tempered, so he’d ask if her period was due, thus making her more irritable still. Who wants to believe that their vision of the world is conditioned by their hormonal state: that no one else is truly at fault, except that believing it makes them so?
‘I’ve just had my period,’ she’d say, ‘as you surely ought to know,’ and make him feel the unfairness of it all, that he should be spared the pain and inconvenience of a monthly menstrual flow, and she should not.
‘Perhaps it’s the pill,’ he’d say.
‘I expect it’s just me,’ she’d say, bitterly.
But how was one to be distinguished from the other? For Liffey’s body was not functioning, as her doctor remarked, as nature intended. Not that ‘nature’ can reasonably be personified in this way—for what is nature, after all, for living creatures, but the sum of the chance genetic events which have led us down one evolutionary path or another. And although what seem to be its intentions may, in a bungled and muddled way, work well enough to keep this species or that propagating, they cannot be said always to be desirable for the individual.
But for good or bad—i.e. convenient for her, inconvenient for the race—Liffey had interfered with her genetic destiny and was on the pill. She took one tablet a day, of factory-made oestrogen and progesterone powders mixed. As a result, Liffey’s ovarian follicles failed to ripen and develop their egg. She could not, for this reason, become pregnant. But her baffled body responded by retaining fluid in its cells, and this made her from time to time more lethargic, irritable and depressed than otherwise would have been the case. Her toes and fingers were puffy. Her wedding ring would not come off, and her shoes hurt. And although the extra secretions from her cervix, responding to the oestrogen, helped preserve her uterus and cervix from cancer, they also predisposed her to thrush infections and inconveniently damped her pants. Her liver functioned differently to cope with the extraneous hormones, but not inefficiently. Her carbohydrate metabolism was altered and her heart was slightly affected, but was strong and young enough to beat steadily and sturdily on.
The veins in her white, smooth legs swelled slightly, but they too were young and strong and did not become varicose. The clotting mechanism of her blood altered, predisposing her to thrombo-embolic disease. But Liffey, which was the main thing, would not become pregnant. Liffey valued her freedom and her figure, and when older friends warned her that marriage must grow out of its early love affair and into bricks and mortar and children, she dismissed their vision of the world as gloomy.
Was Liffey’s resentment of Richard a matter of pressure in her brain caused by undue retention of fluid, or in fact the result of his behaviour? Liffey naturally assumed it was the latter. It is not pleasant for a young woman to believe that her behaviour is dictated by her chemistry, and that her wrongs lie in herself, and not in others’ bad behaviour.
The next weekend Liffey and Richard took their friends Bella and Ray down to visit Honeycomb Cottage.
The trap closed tighter.
‘When I say country,’ said Richard, to everyone, ‘I mean twenty miles outside London at the most. Somerset is impossible. But as a country cottage, it’s a humdinger.’ He had a slightly old-fashioned vocabulary.
Richard was, Bella always felt, a slightly old-fashioned young man. She wanted to loosen him up. She felt there was a wickedness beneath the veneer of well-bred niceness and that it was Liffey’s fault it remained so firmly battened down.
‘When I say have a baby,’ said Liffey, ‘I mean soon, very soon. Not quite now.’
Ray had a theory that wives always made themselves a degree less interesting than their husbands, and that Liffey, if married to, say, himself, would improve remarkably.
Bella and Ray were in their early forties and their friendship with Richard and Liffey was a matter of some speculation to Bella and Ray’s other friends. Perhaps Bella was after Richard, or Ray after Liffey? Perhaps they aimed for foursomes? Or perhaps, the most common consensus, Bella and Ray were just so dreadful they had to find their friends where best they could, and choice did not enter into it.
Bella and Ray—who wrote cookery columns and cookery books—were a couple other couples loved to hate. Liffey and Richard, however, such was their youth and simplicity, accepted Ray and Bella as they were: liked, admired and trusted them, and were flattered by their attention.
Ray and Bella had two children. Bella had waited until her mid-thirties to have them, by which time her fame and fortune were secure.
When Bella and Ray saw the cottage they knew at once it was not for them to admire or linger by. Its sweetness embarrassed them. Their taste ran to starker places: they would feel ridiculous under a thatch, with roses round their door. They rather unceremoniously left Richard and Liffey at the gate and borrowed the car and went off to the ruins of Glastonbury to inspect the monks’ kitchen with a view to a Special on medieval cookery.
‘Richard,’ said Liffey. ‘The main line station’s only ten minutes by car, and there’s a fast early train at seven in the morning which gets you in to London by half-past eight and a fast one back at night so you’d be home by half-past seven, and that’s only half an hour later than you get home now.’
The Tor was distant today, swathed in mists, so that it rose as if from a white sea. And indeed, the surrounding plains, the levels, had once been marsh and sea until drained by monks to provide pasture.
‘I want to live here, Richard,’ said Liffey. ‘If we live here I’ll come off the pill.’ Richard nodded.
He opened Liffey’s handbag and took out her little packet of contraceptive pills.
‘I don’t understand why someone who likes things to be natural,’ he said, ‘could ever rely on anything so unnatural as these.’
Richard took Liffey round to the field at the back and threw her pills, with some ceremony, into the stream, which recent rain had made to flow fast and free.
‘I wonder what he’s throwing away,’ said Mabs watching through the glasses.
‘So
