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 hard? Do say I’ve done well. You’ve no idea how I missed you. There was such a wind, I was quite frightened in the night.’

  Still he did not speak. Hearing her own voice in the silence she knew it was the voice of a child, playing bravely alone in its lighted bedroom, dark corridors between it and parents: making up stories, speaking aloud, filling up space, taking first one rôle, and then the other. Mournful, frightened prattle.

  ‘Did you really stay with Bella?’ She heard her own voice growing up, growing sour. No, she begged, don’t let me.

  But she did.

  ‘Why didn’t you drive back last night? You must have known I’d be miserable on my own.’

  Still silence.

  ‘And you hit me.’

  ‘Do shut up, Liffey,’ said Richard, in a conversational and uncondemning voice, thus enabling her to do so. ‘What’s for supper?’

  She fetched out the sweet-and-sour-pork. She lit the candles. They ate. It was almost what she had dreamed, except that Richard hardly said a word.

  ‘We are in a mess,’ said Richard over the devilled sardines she had prepared in place of dessert. She could see that getting to the shops would be difficult. She would have to get a telephone installed as soon as possible, if only in order to call taxis.

  ‘We’re not,’ said Liffey, ‘we’re here, aren’t we, and it’s lovely, and if you say we have to move back to London I won’t make any trouble. But I would like to stay.’

  Did Liffey have Tucker in mind as she spoke? Opening up whole new universes of power, and passion; laying instinct bare.

  ‘We can’t move back to London,’ said Richard, and even as Liffey’s eyes lit up, said, ‘I’m going to have to stay up in London during the week, and come back at weekends.’

  Liffey wept. Richard explained.

  ‘At least until we can get something sorted out with the lawyers,’ said Richard. ‘Three months or so, I imagine. I can stay with Ray and Bella, on their sofa. It won’t be very comfortable but I can manage.’

  Did Richard have Bella in mind as he spoke, filling his black-and-white world with rich colours of cynicism and new knowledge.

  How long since Liffey had really wept? Not, surely, during all the time she had been married to Richard. Tears had fallen from her eyes for the plight of the helpless, or for abused children, or forsaken wives, or for the tens of thousands swept away by floods in far-off places, but she had not wept for herself.

  ‘I don’t want to be away from you,’ said Richard. ‘Do you think I enjoy sleeping apart from you? But what else can I do?’

  ‘Helen and Mory are supposed to be our friends,’ wept Liffey.

  ‘How can friends behave like that?’

  Richard tried to console Liffey. He told her about army wives whose husbands were away for months at a time, and lighthousemen, and submariners on nuclear submarines who sometimes didn’t come home for years. And the wives of convicts and political prisoners.

  ‘But those are other people,’ cried Liffey. ‘This is me.’

  Richard told Liffey how nice she’d made everything in the cottage, and how he would look forward to coming home at the weekends, and how absence made the heart grow fonder and she believed him, and he believed himself, and they went to bed, tearful but entwined; and he fell asleep, so tired was he, before he could do more than embrace her, and in the morning both slept through the alarm, which was set for five-thirty, so that Richard had to leap out of bed and be gone before she could possibly speak to him.

  Liffey Without Richard

  When Richard had gone Liffey snuggled back into the warm bed and half wondered and half wished that Tucker would come knocking at the door, but he did not. Liffey did not lust after Richard. She never had. They were too well suited, too polite for that. He could produce in her, by kissing and loving, a delicate desire: but not the personal, angry focusing of lust.

  Liffey, waking properly a second time, with the winter sun shining across white frosted fields and the Tor raising its crystalline arm into a pale brilliant sky, felt happy enough. But realising that despondency might soon set in, Liffey made lists.

  Get telephone.

  Learn to drive.

  Organise shopping.

  Invite friends.

  Read gardening books.

  Presently she added:

  Writing paper and stamps.

  And then, later:

  Bicycle, to get to postbox. Powered bicycle, perhaps?

  Later, she added:

  Write book.

  That one frightened her. If there was time and opportunity she might actually have to, and be judged. She would rather have it as a dream, than a reality. She crossed it out.

  Afterwards she wrote:

  Make friends.

  These things, surely, added up to contentment. Madge, in times of trouble, had written lists and posted them up. Earn more money, spend less, stop Liffey picking her nose (or had it been worse? Liffey had a feeling that it was something far more sinister she had to be saved from), find lover, buy brown bread not white. Messages from her good lively self to her depressed self. Stop drinking, she’d even written, in the days when she did: when Liffey would come home from school and find her mother asleep and snoring on her bed. Or had Liffey herself written that one? She thought perhaps that she had. And Madge, as a result, had picked herself up and stopped drinking, and in so doing had given Liffey the encouraging feeling that life was not a gradual descent from good to bad, from youth to age, from health to decay, but rather flowed in waves, good times turning to bad, bad turning to good again. Wait, be patient, shuffle the cards.

  Wait, Liffey; use your time well. Shuffle the cards. Write lists. If you fear loneliness, turn it into solitude and rejoice. Cultivate inner resources, wrote Liffey.

  ‘There is nothing to worrry about,’ Liffey told herself. ‘So long as you are healthy and have money in the bank, there are no problems which cannot be solved.’ She believed it, too.

  Liffey composed a reasonable letter in her head to Mory and Helen, and wrote it out on a brown paper bag, having no writing paper, and then used it, by mistake, to re-light the Aga stove.

  In the afternoon Liffey walked a mile and a half across the fields to the village of Poldyke, where there was a shop, a garage, and a post office, and a doctor came over on Wednesday afternoons from the big village of Crossley. At Crossley there were schools, and pubs, a greengrocer and a chemist. To get to Crossley, five miles away, meant a walk up the lane, past Cadbury Farm, and then along a stretch of main arterial road, where it narrowed alarmingly, and the lorries passed, and did not like pedestrians.

  Liffey arrived at Poldyke one minute after the surgery was closed, in time to see the doctor drive off in his big new car. He was a small, desperate-looking man, with strained eyes in a dark monkey face, not so much older than Liffey: he drove off past her, both gloved hands gripping the wheel, hunched into a great coat, sunk into rich upholstery.

  In the village shop Liffey cried out with delight over a rack of farm overalls, and bought one.

  ‘For your husband? He’ll be working the land up there, then?’

  ‘No. For me,’ said Liffey, before she could stop herself, and had to watch the look of puzzlement appear on Mrs Harris’s narrow face. Mrs Harris worked the land behind the shop. Once or twice a day the shop bell would sound and Mrs Harris would dust off hands and boots and come in to serve.

  ‘She acts as if everything’s toys,’ Mrs Harris complained to Mabs’ mother later, ‘not real things at all.’

  Liffey was now eight days into her new, somewhat irregular menstrual cycle—the fourth since she had stopped taking the contraceptive pill, and her body was still recovering from a surfeit of hormones, as might a car engine flooded by the use of too much choke, and obliged to rest. She had not been made pregnant by Tucker, though who was going to believe a thing like that? And had had no opportunity of becoming pregnant by Richard.

  Richard Without Liffey

  ‘The thing about Liffey,’ said Bella to Richard that evening, ‘is that she’s so gloriously positive. Of course it can be a drawback. Well, look at you! Swept away on the powerful tides of Liffey’s whims!’

  ‘She’s so wonderfully young,’ said Ray. ‘What a pity we all have to grow up.’

  Richard badly missed Liffey, sitting there without her at Ray and Bella’s table. He thought of himself as a tree with its main branch wrenched off, leaving a nasty open wound down the trunk, vulnerable to all kinds of disagreeable infections.

  There were beans on toast and fish fingers for supper, prepared by Helga. Bella and Ray dined excellently in public, but meagrely at home. The dishes for their dinner parties were brought in by a deserted wife and mother of four who lived down the road. She also tested the recipes in the many recipe books which Bella and Ray devised together. Their speciality was fish dishes, but they knew a thing or two about edible fungi. She looked after Tony and Tina, Bella’s children, on Helga’s day off, but was now suffering from nervous exhaustion, so that Helga seldom could have a day off. Helga came from Austria, and worked for her keep, and pocket money.

  Ray and Bella lived busy lives. They had Marxist leanings. They applied their intellectual energies, every now and then, to the practical details of domestic life, so that the home ran smoothly on machinery and the labour of others. Tony and Tina picked up their own toys, lay their own places at table, washed up their own plates and cutlery when they had finished with them, plus one saucepan and mixing bowl each, and put their dirty clothes in the laundry basket and collected them clean from the dryer. They were quiet children. Other parents became quite disagreeable about them.

  Richard had sometimes wished in the past that Liffey was more like Bella, and had a capacity for moneymaking and public speaking. But Liffey devoted all her energies to the actual business of living, not doing, and that, he supposed, was that. And Liffey was restful, and Bella wasn’t. And though Liffey, as Bella had pointed out, might be an emotional challenge, she was certainly not an intellectual one, and that was restful.

  Richard found himself vaguely mistrustful of Bella and Ray’s kindness in offering him, so readily, the use of Bella’s sofa. He would have felt reassured had they suggested he baby-sat, but they had not. He told himself, over tinned peaches and custard, that he must not become paranoic. That Mory and Helen’s perfidy must not blind him to the essential goodness of others, and justness of the Universe. Business, after all, proceeded by trust, and the world, so far as he could see, was given over to big business.

  Mory’s ‘shitsville, man’ had been a shock, no doubt of it. The aggressions and hostilities that Richard had met, in his thirty-two years, had been of the muted, civilised kind; confined to office memos or gentle, if confusing, parental words. Richard, like Liffey, had learned early to placate, and smile, and turn away anger, and mix with others of a like frame of mind. ‘If you didn’t read the papers,’ Liffey once said to Richard, ‘but only looked about you, you’d really believe the world was a nice place.’ And not recognising hate, spite or anger in themselves, and so not understanding how these things show their greater face in the dealings of management with labour, governments with governed, and so forth, could only look to communism or socialism, or fascism, or any other available ism, as the source of conflict. Trouble, seen as coming from the outside, and working its way in, and not the other way about.

  During the rest of the week Richard developed a whole assortment of fears and suspicions. He suspected that money was missing from his wallet, that taxi drivers were cheating him by going the long way round, that his fellow employees were talking behind his back, that Miss Martin was going to make amorous advances, and that Liffey had organised his absence from her in order to be unfaithful. Such a thought as this latter had never crossed his mind before. He murmured it to Bella who only laughed and said, ‘Projection, Richard,’ which he did his best not to understand.

  Miss Martin made call after call to Richard’s solicitors. He confided in her now, and she in him. She seemed, marginally, in this new world of treachery, less dangerous than Bella.

  Miss Martin was saving through a building society. In three years she would marry her fiancé, then they would own their own house from the beginning. No rented accommodation for them. Richard marvelled at how well people of no ambition could run their lives. Miss Martin’s boyfriend Jeff was finishing an apprenticeship as an electrical engineer. He would call for her, at the office, on occasion, and was a surprisingly handsome, tall and lively young man. Miss Martin was a virgin. She told Richard so. She believed in saving herself for marriage. She thought perhaps she was under-sexed, and hoped it didn’t matter. There were more important things in life. Miss Martin was very capable. She never forgot things. She plodded around the office, thick-ankled and knowledgeable. The danger that she might turn into a seductress evaporated.

  Liffey was more educated, more cultured and sophisticated than Miss Martin, but Miss Martin would never have misread a timetable.

  And Miss Martin would never expect her Jeff to drive six hours a day, just so that she could live in the cottage of her dreams. On the contrary, Miss Martin let herself be guided by Jeff’s will in everything other than in sexual matters, where her will prevailed.

  Lonely nights without Liffey.

  Brave Liffey.