No, no, thought Liffey, I can’t be pregnant. Not this month. Not while Tucker might be remotely connected with the event. Which surely he wasn’t, because surely—
Liffey discovered she knew next to nothing about pregnancy or what went on inside her, and really had no particular wish to know. It is hard to believe that the cool, smooth, finished perfection of young skin covers up such a bloody, pulpy, incoherent, surging mass of pulsing organs within: hard to link up spirit to body, mind to matter, ourselves to others, others to everything. But there it is, and here we are. Hearts beating, minds running; fuel in, energy out.
Liffey, trembling on the edge of a train of a train of thought that would both enhance and yet debase her, make her ordinary where she had thought herself special, special where she had believed herself ordinary, was pushed by guilt and trepidation to go into Poldyke and buy the one paperback book on pregnancy that they had in stock.
News quickly got back to Mabs.
Mabs stood and stared at the Tor. It was very cold that day and deathly still. The cows stopped rustling in the fields and the birds waited in the trees. Tucker stayed out of the house and sent the children to Mabs’s mother.
“No reason to think it’s mine,” said Tucker to the trees.
To Mabs, Tucker said, “Just because she’s bought a book doesn’t mean she is.”
But Mabs did not reply, and both knew, as surely as one knows a death before it’s verified, that Liffey was indeed pregnant.
Liffey wondered: Mabs and Tucker knew.
Everything Mabs felt but gave no voice to, partly because she scorned to, partly because she did not have a vocabulary to express the complexity of the things she felt—fear of ageing, fear of death, loss of father, fear of mother, hate of sister, resentment of her children (who, once born, were not what she had meant at all), jealousy of Tucker, sexual desire towards other women, pretty women, helpless women; resentment of women who spread their possessions, their homes, delicately around them and stood back in pride; envy of brainy women, stylish women, rich women, women who could explain their lives in words—all these things Mabs felt, surging up in a great wordless storm, on knowing that Liffey was pregnant.
She, Mabs, could stump about the fields and put her powerful hands before her, and spread her fingers wide, and the whole power of the Universe would dart through them—but what use was that to Mabs? It could not make her what she wanted to be.
Mabs, pregnant, felt the fury of her unconscious passions allayed and could be almost happy. And so, pregnant, became ordinary, like anyone else, and used her hands to cook, and clean, and sew, and soothe, and not as psychic conductors.
Mabs knew too that there are only so many babies to go round and that if Liffey was pregnant, she would not be.
Mabs thought all these things, and since she could not voice them, then forget them, she knew only that she liked Liffey even less than before and that the answer to her dislike was not to keep out of Liffey’s way. No.
The air grew warmer: the cows rustled in the fields; the birds found the courage to leave the trees and look for food in the thawing ground: clouds passed easily over and around the Tor.
Tucker fetched the children back. Tucker liked the idea of Liffey being pregnant. It was as if Mabs had barred the light of the world, eclipsing it, and suddenly he could see round her, and all this time she had been hiding wonderful things.
Liffey was in her fifth week of pregnancy. The baby was two millimetres long and lay within a newly formed amniotic sac. Its backbone was now beginning to form.
Liffey felt her tender breasts and thought, No, no, surely not. She was not ready to have a baby. She had not grown out of her own childhood: a baby was something that would grow at her expense: that would diminish her: that would bring her nearer death. It seemed bizarre, not natural at all.
She said nothing about it when Richard came home the next weekend. And he told her that he thought Bella was a repressed lesbian and that Miss Martin had announced her engagement in the local papers, and they both laughed a little, but kindly, at the hypocrisies of the one and the modest aspirations of the other.
“As for Helga,” said Richard, “she’s the original hausfrau! The three K’s. Kirche, Kuche, Kinder. I thought women like that went out with the dinosaur. Of course she’s the size of one.”
But Richard’s shirts were clean and ironed, and he brought no washing home for Liffey. She was glad of that. She was feeling a little tired.
She felt an increase in her sexual desire for Richard. She wished to try new positions, but Richard seemed embarrassed, so she quickly desisted, marvelling at herself. It was as if her body, no longer needing to insist on procreation, had at last found time for its own amusement. Richard went back to London on Sunday night. She hoped her conduct in bed had not driven him away early.
On the Monday morning Liffey was sick, and on the Monday afternoon went into Crossley and bought, with some embarrassment, a pregnancy-testing kit, and by Tuesday mid-day, having dropped some early-morning urine into a phial, adding the provided chemicals, and putting it to set, soon knew that she was pregnant.
A certain elation began to mingle with her fear. The sick feeling, which might have been brought on by anxiety and uncertainty, lessened a little.
Liffey went round to Mabs.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “Can I use the telephone to ring Richard?”
“But that’s wonderful!” cried Mabs, and insisted that they open a bottle of blackberry wine to celebrate, and delayed Liffey getting to the telephone until well after one o’clock, by which time Richard had gone to lunch.
Or so Miss Martin said. In actual fact Richard had just kissed her gently on the eyes to soothe away her tears, and she had had to break away from his embrace to answer the telephone. The tears had come after a full office week in which Richard had ignored her except for sending letters back for re-typing, and reproving her in front of other people. She thought, she hoped, that the cause of his unkindness was her having announced .her engagement to Jeff, but how could she be sure? She knew that tears irritated him, but by Tuesday lunchtime could no longer hold them back.
And instead of shouting, he kissed her.
“Who was that?” asked Richard.
“It was only your wife,” said Miss Martin, and he had to stop himself from striking her. Only Liffey! He knew that Jeff, poor Jeff, would end up beating her. She invited it, mingling tears with acts of hostility.
“But it was your lunch-hour”—Miss Martin put in her feeble excuse—“you said you didn’t want to be disturbed in your lunch-hour.”
He made her ring back Cadbury Farm and get Liffey on the line. But Mabs answered. Her broad accent rang thick and strange in the quiet office.
“Your Liffey’s here tippling with me,” said Mabs, “and she’s got something important to tell you. She’s pregnant.”
There was silence. Mabs had the receiver away from her ear. “I’ll bet that shook him,” she said aside to Liffey.
Liffey took the phone. There were tears in her eyes. She felt that a moment had gone, lost, never to be recaptured. It was one in which she might have lost her fear of having the baby and in Richard’s spontaneous pleasure learned how to accept it.
“Are you sure?” Richard was saying. “Liffey, are you there? You’re sure you haven’t made a mistake?”
The telephone went dead, and although Miss Martin, sobbing, denied that it was her doing and did her trembly best to re-establish the connection, Liffey at the same time was trying to get through to Richard, and by the time she did he had indeed gone off to a meeting.
“Is there any message?” asked Miss Martin, who had recovered her composure, and blamed Liffey because she had lost it in the first place. “I’d ask him to ring back, but he is so busy this week, and we’re expecting a call through on this line from Amsterdam.”
Liffey put down the phone.
“I don’t like the sound of that secretary,” said Mabs. “She sounds
for all the world like a wife.”
Suppositions
Knowledge of pregnancy comes early to modern woman, perhaps too early, before body and mind have settled down into tranquillity.
Liffey, all alone, trembled and feared and cried. She thought that to be pregnant was to be ugly and that afterwards her body would be spoiled—she would have pendulous breasts and a flabby belly.
Her mother, Madge, had strange creases over her stomach, flaps of ugly skin, for which she held Liffey responsible.
“Stretch marks!” she would observe, making no attempt to hide them. Madge viewed her body as something functional: if it worked that was all she cared about. But Liffey loved her body and cherished it: she feared maturity, she wanted to be looked after for ever, to be placed physically at a point somewhere between girl-child and stripling lad—hips and bosom all promise, waiting for some other time, but not now, not now. Not yet.
Richard wanted a boy-wife, she knew it. She knew it from the way he groaned at biscuits and moaned at buns and worried in case she grew fat.
On the way home from Cadbury Farm, Liffey slipped and fell, and lay for a moment, stunned and shaken, with the world slipping and sliding about her.
A face loomed over her. It was Tucker. Tucker helped her up and set her on her feet, calmly and kindly. “You look after yourself,” he said. “And don’t go drinking too much of Mabs’s wine. It isn’t good for you.”
Liffey ran home, as quickly as she could over slippery ground, for light snow had been falling, and locked the door. During the night more snow fell, fine and light and driven by strong winds, which in the morning left a blue, washed sky.
And such a brilliant tranquillity of white stretched across the plain to the Tor, broken only by the sketched pencil-lines of the half-buried hedgerows, that tears of wonder came to her eyes, and she felt better.
Richard woke on Bella’s sofa to the sight of Bella’s books— the works of Man, not Nature—and found it reassuring. The news of Liffey’s pregnancy had come as a shock. He was glad, but not altogether glad.
If Richard was to be husband and father, how could Bella continue his education? How could he in all conscience continue to lie on his back with Bella on top of him, wresting from him any number of degrading pleasures?
How could he discover what it was in Miss Martin that made her cry when she lay beneath him, as if she had the key to all the sorrows of the Universe?
How could he discover the nature of Helga’s being, which he now passionately desired to know?
But to be a father! There was pride in that, and pleasure in looking after Liffey, and wonder in the knowledge that a man was not just himself but so stuffed overfull with life that there was enough to pass on—and here in Liffey was the proof of it.
Richard decided to give up Bella and Miss Martin and concentrate on Liffey.
It was a decision he was to make frequently in the following months, as a dedicated but guilty smoker decides to give up smoking.
Six weeks. The limb buds of the foetus began to show. The tail to disappear. The heart formed within the chest cavity and began the activity that was to last till the end of its days. Blood vessels formed in the cervical cord. Parts of the stomach and intestine formed.
Liffey wondered how to be rid of a baby she did not want without telling anyone that she did not want it.
Richard wondered how to subdue in himself that part of his nature that did not dovetail with his nature as husband and father.
Liffey thought she was growing a malformed baby, which would have a lolling head and tongue, and flippers for arms, finished off by Tucker’s black fingernails. Liffey was guilty, in other words, and believed that no good could come out of her.
Mabs walked about the hills and fields, and the rain poured out of the heavens so hard it stirred up the ground where she trod, and there was little to choose between heaven, or earth, or her. The Tor vanished altogether, obscured by water, fog and cloud, in which, occasionally, sheets of lightning danced. Earth, water, fire and air no longer retained their separate parts.
Seven weeks. Budding arms and legs and little clefts for fingers and toes. Blood vessels throughout, and the liver and kidneys forming. A spinal cord, and a well-shaped head with the beginnings of a face, and a brain inside. It was not, all the same, conscious. It was an automaton, as the jellyfish are, and the whole kingdom of the plants, and much but not all of the insect world. It was not yet truly a mammal. Mammals have the gift of consciousness: decision can over-ride instinct, and often, but perhaps not as often as we assume, does.
“You are looking poorly,” said Mabs, and made Liffey a brew of ergot and tansy tea, a rich abortifacient, which had, fortunately for Liffey but unfortunately for Mabs, no effect on Liffey or her baby beyond giving the mother slight diarrhoea. “This will do you good.”
Liffey had become a little frightened of Mabs and drank whatever she suggested for fear of offending her.
Richard succumbed to loneliness, vague resentments of Liffey, various worries connected with the varying saline content of the water flow at the soup works, and fornicated as much as possible with Miss Martin and Bella.
“I shouldn’t,” whispered Miss Martin. “Not if your wife is pregnant.” But she did, and even left out her own contraceptive cap once, and fortunately did not get pregnant, an episode that led her to believe she was infertile and did nothing for her self-esteem. She knew nothing about ova—where they were or how long they lasted. All she knew was that her very being cried out to have Richard’s baby if Liffey did: and her conscious mind, that glory of the mammal kingdom, did very little to protect her.
“Live as much as you can while you can,” said Bella. “Before life and Liffey close in.” Bella was old, by Nature’s standards, and her conscious mind had less trouble over-riding her instinctive drives. All that remained of naturally rivalrous behaviour was her current irrational dislike for and impulsive disparagement of Richard’s pregnant wife, Liffey.
Mabs’s period began, staining oyster-silk underwear. Mabs scrubbed away, hating Liffey, and focused her ill-will. And in London, Helen looked up and saw the letters to Liffey on the mantelpiece and said, “I suppose I’d better post those,” and did, and Mabs at once felt better and actually baked a cake for tea.
Liffey opened the letters and understood that she was no longer rich, that she was to live as the rest of the world did, unprotected from financial disaster; that she was pregnant and dependent upon a husband, and that her survival, or so it seemed, was bound up with her pleasing him. That she was not, as she had thought, a free spirit, and nor was he: that they were bound together by necessity. That he could come and go as he pleased; love her, leave her as he pleased; hand over as much or as little of his earnings as he pleased; and that domestic power has to do with economics. And that Richard, by virtue of being powerful, being also good, would no doubt look after her and her child and not insist upon doing so solely upon his terms. But he could and he might, so Liffey had better behave, charm, lure, love and render herself necessary by means of the sexual and caring comforts she provided.
Wash socks, iron shirts. Love.
And that to have been unfaithful was a terrible thing. That financially dependent wives are more faithful than independent wives. That she must go carefully.
Liffey thought of all these things for the space of three days.
“You’re looking worse,” said Mabs and offered Liffey more ergot and tansy tea, which Liffey pretended to take but emptied instead into a pot plant, which was altogether dead two days later. Had Liffey known this she might indeed have drunk the tea.
On the fourth day Liffey ran and ran up country lanes and over tough ground, fleeing her past, and her present, and her mother, and trying to shake her baby free. But the baby barely noticed any change in its environment. How could it!
Annunciation
The wind sang in Liffey’s ears and told her she was wasting effort and energy, that all things were destined, that she
was what she was born and would never change, would for ever be the girl without a father who wished she had no mother, and that though she ran and ran she would never escape herself. As Liffey ran, so antelope run over the African plain, and kittens across the domestic lawn, frightened by themselves, seeking refuge in flight, running as likely into danger as to safety. Her muscles ached, her energy drained. Liffey stopped running.
Liffey looked about her. The rain, which had poured and poured for weeks, had stopped, and the sky was washed and palest blue. She could still see the Tor, but now from a different angle, so that its slope was less acute and the tower on top was clearly man-made, not eternal. It was friendly, scarcely numen- istic at all. It had been weeks, she felt, since she had looked about her and noticed the world in which she lived. She saw that the leaf buds were on the trees and that new bright grass pushed up beneath her feet, and that there was a sense of expectation in the air. All things prepared, and waited.
Liffey sat on the ground and turned her face towards the mild sun. She felt a presence, the touch of a spirit, clear and benign. She opened her eyes, startled, but there was no one there, only a dazzle in the sky where the sun struck slantwise between the few puffy white clouds that hovered over the Tor.
“It’s me,” said the spirit, said the baby, “I’m here. I have arrived. You are perfectly all right and so am I. Don’t worry.” The words were spoken in her head: they were graceful and certain. They charmed. Liffey smiled and felt herself close and curl, as a sunflower does at night, to protect and shelter. The words dispersed, and the outside sounds came in. Birdsong, traffic, distant voices.
“I have been blessed,” said Liffey to herself, walking carefully and warily home, eyes inside and misting from time to time. She did not say it to anyone else, for who would believe her?
Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 Page 13