Dick Hubbard was worried because he had let Honeycomb Cottage when he should have sold, and allowed short-time interest to stand in the way of long-term benefit. He had recognised, long ago, that to act in this way was to doom himself to financial mediocrity. But still he let it happen.

  ‘She bought a Rotovator,’ he complained now to Carol.

  ‘She’ll soon get tired of it,’ said Carol, comfortingly, ‘and the weeds will be back.’

  ‘She was even asking round for a builder.’

  ‘Then have a word with the builder. You can pay a builder a fortune and the chimney will still come through the roof. What’s the matter with you, Dick? Where’s your spirit?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The energy seems to have left my brain and gone down between my legs. I suppose that’s how you like it.’

  ‘I’ll supply enough brain for both of us,’ said Carol. ‘You just supply the other.’

  Mr and Mrs Lee-Fox lay under the moon and worried about Richard. He was their only son.

  ‘Perhaps I brought him up wrong,’ said Mrs Lee-Fox.

  ‘You did the best you could. Every mother does.’

  It was their normal way of speaking—she agitating, he comforting. Now, in the middle of the night, it came like automatic speech.

  ‘He should never have married her.’

  ‘She’s a nice, bright girl. His choice.’

  ‘We’ll never have grandchildren.’

  ‘Give them time.’

  ‘Our lovely apartment. And they’ve let the squatters in!’

  ‘The law will get them out.’

  ‘All our savings went to get him started.’

  ‘And he is started,’ said Mr Lee-Fox. ‘That’s the way life goes. As his starts, ours closes in. We’re left with the pickings of his takings. Once it was the other way around. You did it to your parents, I did it to mine. Now it’s our turn.’ ‘I don’t want it to be,’ she said, as if he, like Superman, could turn the world the other way, but he just grunted and fell asleep. The moonlight cratered her skin as if it were the moon’s surface, so she looked fifty years older than the modest fifty-three she was.

  As for Liffey, the gripes in her stomach became worse. She spent the night groaning on the sofa or moaning on the lavatory seat. Liffey was not good at pain. Stoicism was her mother’s prerogative. Madge, even if stung by a wasp, would manage to clamp her teeth before the involuntary scream could be fully released. Liffey, similarly stung, would shriek and jump and fling her arms about, breaking dishes and spilling food, giving easy voice to pain, shock and indignation.

  Liffey was afraid of pain, as people often are who have endured little of it. She had never had toothache, never broken a bone, and had spent a healthy youth, unplagued by unpleasant minor illness. She avoided emotional pain by pulling herself together when nasty or uncomfortable thoughts threatened, and diverting herself conscientiously if she felt depression setting in. It could not always be done, but she did her best. Liffey was afraid of childbirth because she knew it would hurt. How could it not, if so large an object as a baby was to leave so confined a space? And the cries and groans of women in childbirth was part of her filmic youth: yes, that was pain, PAIN. And supposing the baby were born deformed? The fear would accompany her pregnancy, she knew it would. She could not say these things to Richard: women, though allowed to flinch at spiders and shudder at the thought of dirtying their hands, were expected to face pregnancy and childbirth with equanimity. Nor could she expect sympathy from Madge, who would see it as further proof of her daughter’s errant femininity. And as for her friends—ah, her friends. Only a few days away, and she could scarcely remember their names or their faces. Liffey kept her fears to herself, and let others believe her reluctance to have a baby was, in the terms of an older generation, ‘selfish’, and in those of her contemporaries ‘political’—namely, that she feared to lose her freedom and her figure, and sink into the maternal swamp.

  Richard gave up waiting for Liffey to feel better and fell asleep at two-fifteen. He had had a long day. Up at seven, the strain of breakfast with friends, not family: then the office, a business lunch, a conference: then the long drive back to Liffey, then supper with the Pierces: and now poor Liffey groaning and clutching her stomach. He doubted whether he could have managed to make love to Liffey, even had she been feeling well, even had her pains been due to ovulation and she at her most fertile.

  Richard slept. Liffey groaned.

  It was not until after three that a cloud covered the moon: or, as Tucker felt, that Mabs let the moon go, stopped staring, and slept.

  The cloud passed: the moon shone bright and firm again. In the morning, when the sun rose, it could still be seen as a pale disc low in the sky. Mabs waved to the disc as if to a friend, when she rose early to help with the cows. Lights flashed behind the Tor; she could not be sure why. She had noticed the phenomenon before.

  ‘Something’s going to happen,’ she said to the moon, feeling a small excitement grow within her.

  Mabs cast an eye over to Honeycomb Cottage and noticed that no smoke rose from the chimney, and presumed, rightly, that the kitchen range had gone out and that Liffey had had a bad night after the Turkish delight, and laughed.

  Good and Bad

  All the next day too Liffey moaned and groaned and shivered. The tiny bathroom was unheated, and there was no hot water, since the kitchen stove had gone out overnight.

  ‘Oh, Liffey,’ Richard reproached his wife, gently enough, for she was a poor, weak, pale, shivery thing, ‘it’s one thing to live like this from necessity, but I can see no virtue in doing it from choice.’

  ‘It would be all right if everything was working smoothly,’ said Liffey, but she hardly believed it herself any more. She could see Richard was being brave and trying hard not to complain, and to enjoy what she enjoyed: and also perceived that he never would, and never could, had had to accept that though they were one flesh, yet they were different people, and that one or the other would have to submit. And that she had.

  Richard cleared the flue with a broomstick and went up on the roof and extracted the matted twigs of jackdaws’ nests which blocked the chimney. In one of the nests he found silver foil, bottle tops and a piece of Woolworth’s jewellery, which he would have presented, ceremoniously, to Liffey, had she been in a fit state to receive it, or he, indeed, to give it. She was ill and he was dirty. He had to boil kettle after kettle of water before he could clean away the soot from his face and neck and the grime beneath his nails.

  ‘But I like you dirty,’ said Liffey. ‘It’s natural.’ She was wrapped up warm and cosy on the sofa, and feeling a little better. She had been purged of her sin, her liaison with Tucker. ‘What has nature got to do with us?’ he asked. ‘We’ve left the cave. Too late to go back.’

  Outside, the trees were gaunt and bare against the winter sky, and snow clouds massed grey and thick behind the Tor. That pulled one way: Richard the other.

  ‘Do you want to sell soup all the days of your life?’ asked Liffey, ‘live in an artificial world entirely?’

  ‘Yes, Liffey I do. I want you to have babies and me to be their father and that’s enough nature for me. I want to have light and heat at the touch of a button, and never to have to clear a flue in all the rest of my life. I find the country sinister, Liffey.’

  It was an odd admission from him, who liked to deny the existence of anything that science could not properly understand. ‘That’s because you fight it,’ said Liffey. Smoke puffed out of the chimney and made Richard cough, but swirled round Liffey, leaving her alone. Liffey deduced, wrongly, that nature was on her side. She was its pawn, perhaps, but scarcely an ally. Mabs could have told her that.

  ‘In the meantime,’ said Richard, ‘we shall make the best of it, since we have to, and I will put up with being away from you during the week, and you will put up with being separated from me, and I promise not to look lustfully at anyone and you must do the same.’

  Now that Richard was with Liffey again he regretted his sexual lapse with Bella. It had happened while both were under the influence of drink, so much so that neither could (or at any rate had the excuse not to) remember the details the next day. Both had quickly resolved that it should not happen again, or Richard had. In the clear light of Liffey’s gaze, he was happy enough that it should not.

  Both had agreed, on marriage, that sexual jealousy was a despicable emotion, and, while playing safe, and pledging mutual fidelity, had taken it as a matter for congratulation that neither was a prey to it. That it might more reasonably be a matter for commiseration—inasmuch as neither offered the other so profound a sexual satisfaction as to make them fear the losing of it—did not occur to them.

  Nevertheless, Liffey had certainly suffered a whole range of unpleasant emotions—disappointment, pique, humiliation and so on—over what Richard now thought of as ‘The Office Party Episode’, and he did not wish her, or indeed himself, to go through that again.

  And he regretted even more than the physical infidelity, the more subtle betrayal of Liffey of which he was guilty—the discussion of her failings with others. Prying himself loose from her, as if he was the host and she the parasite, he had let in so much light and air that the close warm symbiosis between them could never quite be repaired. They had been one: he had, in self-defence, rendered them two.

  He could see, moreover, the threat to their happiness which their weekly separation entailed. He would see her, each weekend, more and more clearly. She, because she waited, would see what she expected. He, the one waited for, and for that reason the more powerful, would see reality. He feared that marital happiness lay in being so close to the partner that the vision was in fact blurred.

  But it was a situation she herself had brought about. He could not be responsible for it, nor suffer too much on account of it. It was comfortable and convenient at Bella’s, and exciting, too, in a way he would rather not think about.

  ‘I’ll bring down paint and wallpaper next weekend,’ said Richard. ‘We’ll make everything lovely.’

  ‘And guests,’ said Liffey. ‘Friends! Perhaps Bella and Ray would come?’

  ‘They’re very busy,’ said Richard. And they went through their friends, and discovered that most would be too busy, or too frightened by discomfort, or too in need of crowds, or too quarrelsome, and in general too restless, to make good guests.

  They made themselves think of Mory and Helen, although the subject upset them, and decided, or at any rate Liffey did, that Helen had fallen under the influence of her sister Lally, and that Mory was suffering from some kind of brainstorm consequent upon unemployment, and that it could not be concluded that there was anything disagreeable at all about the nature of human beings or the foibles of friends. It was, as it were, a one-off experience and should not embitter them. So said Liffey. Richard merely concluded, in his heart, that the business world and the personal world were pretty much the same, after all. Everyone behaved as well as they could afford to, but not one whit more.

  ‘All the same,’ said Liffey, ‘let’s just have you and me at weekends.’ She suspected that was what Richard wanted: that after a week at the office and in Bella and Ray’s home, he would be glad of peace and solitude at weekends. And he thought that was what she really wanted, and was relieved. ‘Money isn’t important,’ said Liffey, a little later. ‘Money can’t buy love.’

  It was a favourite phrase, and one which came easily to the lips of someone who had never gone short of it.

  Liffey’s fortune, although she did not know it, was in fact down to seventeen pounds eighty-four pence. The cheque made out for the Rotovator, at present passing through the central banking computer, albeit at its slow Sunday pace, would overdraw her account by five hundred and thirty pounds and eight pence. Three years ago Liffey had instructed her bank to sell stock at will in order to keep her current account in balance, and this they had dutifully done. There was no more stock to sell. A letter to this effect had been delivered to her London home on the very day she left for the country. Mory and Helen had neither the will nor the inclination to forward letters, and this one now lay behind an empty beer can on the mantelpiece.

  ‘If they want their mail,’ said Lally, ‘let them come and get it. I don’t see why you should do them any favours!’

  The apartment, which once had been warm with the smell of baking and the scent of the honeysuckle Liffey had managed to grow in a pot on the windowsill, and sweet and decorous with the music of Dylan and Johann Sebastian Bach, was now a cold, hard, musty place, stripped of decoration, echoing with righteous murmurings.

  ‘Richard needn’t think I’m going to pay him a penny rent,’ said Mory. ‘Because I’m not. I’m not the kind of person other people can send solicitor’s letters to, with impunity. I give as good as I get.’

  ‘It’s not even as if we could pay the rent,’ said Helen, ‘as Richard knew perfectly well when he asked us in to caretake this dump of a place.’

  ‘He’s let this place run down,’ said Lally’s builder boyfriend, pointing out a damp patch in the ceiling, the blocked bathroom basin overflow, and the flaking plaster under the stairs. He pulled at a hot water pipe to demonstrate the rottenness of the wall behind it and the pipe broke in two and it was some time before anyone could find the stop cock of the water main. ‘People who don’t look after places don’t deserve to have them,’ he said, rolling another joint. He had given up building since meeting Lally. He referred to himself as Lally’s piece of rough.

  ‘I think Richard’s got a nerve,’ said Helen, the next day, pulling out the gas cooker to adjust a pipe so that the supply would bypass the meter, ‘asking any rent at all for a place like this. Look at the wall behind the cooker. It’s thick with grease! Liffey needn’t think I’m going to clear up after her.’

  ‘It’s just a slum,’ said Lally, feeding the fire with the remains of a bentwood rocker, ‘everything in it’s broken.’ Liffey had left the chair, an original Tonne, under the stairs, while she found a responsible caner to re-do the broken canework.

  ‘I say,’ said Mory, uneasily, ‘I think that might be rather a good chair you’ve been burning.’

  ‘It was broken,’ said Lally. ‘Same as everything else in this dump.’

  ‘Possession is theft,’ said her boyfriend, going to sleep.

  ‘All this antique junk,’ said Helen, ‘I really used to dig that scene, didn’t I, Mory? Remember? Then I realised it was part of the nostalgia which keeps the human race dragging its feet. Chairs are things you sit in, not mementos to the past.’ Mory said a little prayer, however, as the flames licked in and out the little bevelled squares of golden cane. Sometimes he wondered where the womenfolk were leading him: whether living by principle couldn’t go too far.

  During that weekend Mory and Helen took in a pregnant cat who settled in the linen cupboard and had kittens in a nest of Victorian tablecloths. Helen loved the kittens. Lally had pains from time to time, and thought she might be having the baby, but Helen looked up the Book of Symptoms and all decided she was not. They had given up doctors, who were an essential part of the male conspiracy against women, and were seeing Lally through her pregnancy themselves. At the very last moment, the plan was, they would dial 999 for an ambulance for Lally, who would then be taken to the nearest hospital too late for enemas, shaving, epidurals, and all the other ritual humiliations women in childbirth were subjected to, and simply give birth to the baby.

  ‘I suppose you must know what you’re doing,’ said Lally’s builder boyfriend, whose name no one could remember but which in fact was Roy, whose father had been a hardline Stalinist, and who was fighting—at least they hoped he was fighting—a severe indoctrination in authoritarianism.

  ‘There’s a positive correlation,’ said Helen, ‘between the hospitalisation of mothers and infant mortality rates. We know what we’re doing all right.’

  Lally’s pains were quite severe.

  ‘That means it’s not labour,’ said Helen, ‘it can’t be. You don’t have pains when you’re having a baby, you have contractions. All that stuff about pain is part of the myth. Having a baby is just a simple, natural thing.’

  Helen was excited by her new view of the Universe. Acid-tripping for the first time, six months previously, at Lally’s instigation, had caused her radically to rethink her life and attitudes. If Lally showed signs of reneging, falling back into the accepted framework of society, Helen was there to prevent it.

  Lally’s pains stopped, and later she had diarrhoea and other symptoms of food poisoning, so Helen was vindicated. She put Lally on a water-only diet for two days. They clustered round the bamboo fire, which burned yellowly and brightly, and had a consciousness-raising session.

  Were they all to be made homeless by the whims of the likes of Richard and Liffey? No. Would they fight for the roof over their heads: fight individual landlords: fight the system which denied them their natural rights? Yes. Would they join the Claimants’ Union, just around the corner? Tomorrow! All went to bed invigorated, cheerful and fruitful.