Holding Back

      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 long as it’s nothing as will harm the cows,’ said

      Tucker. ‘They drink that water.’

      ‘Told you they’d be back,’ said Mabs.

      And Mabs and Tucker had a discussion as to whether it was in their best interests to have Richard and Liffey renting the cottage, and decided that it was, so long as they rented, and didn’t buy. An outright purchaser would soon discover that the two-acre field, on the far side of the stream, belonged to the cottage, and not, as Tucker pretended, to Cadbury Farm. Tucker found it convenient to graze his cows there; but would not find it convenient to pay for grazing rights. ‘You tell your sister to tell Dick Hubbard to keep his mouth shut about the stream field,’ said Tucker.

      Dick Hubbard was the estate agent responsible for Honeycomb Cottage, with whom Mabs’ sister Carol was having an affair. Dick Hubbard was not married, but Carol was. Mabs disapproved of the relationship, and did not like Tucker mentioning it. Many things, these days, Mabs did not like. She did not like being forty any more than the next woman did; she was beginning to fear, for one reason and another, that she was infertile. She was, in general, suffering from a feeling she could only describe as upset—a wavering of purpose from day to day. And she did not like it.

      ‘He’ll keep it shut of his own accord,’ said Mabs.

      Something about Liffey upset her even more: the arrogant turn of her head as she sat in the car waiting for Tucker’s cows to pass; the slight condescension in the smile; the way she leaned against Richard as if she owned him; the way she coupled with him, as she was doing now, in the open air, like an animal. Mabs felt that Liffey had everything too easy. Mabs felt that, rightly, Liffey had nothing to do in the world but enjoy herself, and that Liffey should be taken down a peg or two.

      ‘Nice to have a new neighbour,’ said Mabs, comfortingly, and Tucker looked at her suspiciously.

      ‘I wouldn’t fancy it down in the grass,’ said Mabs. ‘That stream’s downright unhealthy, and nasty things grow there at this time of year.’

      ‘You won’t mind when I swell up like a balloon?’ Liffey was saying to Richard.

      ‘I’ll love you all the more,’ said Richard. ‘I think pregnant women are beautiful. Soft and rounded and female.’ She lay on his chest, her bare breasts cool to his skin. He felt her limbs stiffen and grow tense before she cried out, her voice sharp with horror.

      ‘Look! What are they? Richard!’

      Giant puffballs had pushed up out of the ground a yard or so from where they lay. How could she not have noticed them before? Three white globes, giant mushroom balls, each the size and shape of a human skull, thinned in yellowy white, stood blindly sentinel. Liffey was on her feet, shuddering and aghast.

      ‘They’re only puffballs,’ said Richard. ‘Nature’s bounty.

      They come up overnight. What’s the matter with you?’

      The matter was that the smooth round swelling of the fungus made Liffey think of a belly swollen by pregnancy, and she said so. Richard found another one, but its growth had been stunted by tangled conch-grass, and its surface was convoluted, brownish and rubbery.

      ‘This one looks like a brain in some laboratory jar,’ said Richard.