Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 Read Free

responding to the oestrogen,
helped preserve her uterus and cervix from cancer, they also predisposed her to
thrush infections and inconveniently dampened 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.

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 that 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