Weldon, Fay - Novel 07

by Puffball (v1. 1)

  “Richard, I felt the baby’s spirit arrive. It was the soul that came. I know it was.”

  No.

  “Madge, Mother, did you know I was pregnant? No? Well, I am, and what’s more, the Holy Ghost or something descended and now inhabits me.”

  ?

  No.

  “Mabs, friend, you know how I slept with your husband, Tucker—well, you don’t, but I did, except it isn’t his baby. Well, I just know, because the baby’s said so—”

  ?

  No.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Fox, your daughter-in-law speaking, the flimsy one who trapped your only son into marriage, the never-quite-accepted, never-to-be-accepted one, who tried to charm her way into your hearts but failed, who now says just to have Richard’s child isn’t enough, but has to have an Annunciation instead, as if Richard was some Middle-Eastern carpenter and she was Mary—”

  ?

  No.

  “Bella and Ray, Liffey speaking. You know, Richard’s wife, your lodger’s wife, who chose to live in the country and apart from her husband and is now pregnant and poor but compensating with quasi-religious experiences—”

  p

  No.

  Liffey made up the fire, and polished the windows to let every scrap of light in, and settled down to cherish the baby.

  Growth

  Richard, told of the loss of Liffey’s wealth, frittered away on pretty things and useless things and delicious things, was first irritated, then relieved, and then filled with a great sense of protectiveness and love for Liffey, as if by her very helplessness she solicited something from him that she hitherto had not, and moved through the world with an added weight and dignity, so that presently his colleagues remarked to one another that Richard had changed.

  “He’s older than one thinks,” somebody said, and at meetings his voice was listened to, and not just heard.

  Richard resolved to give up Miss Martin and Bella, and kept the resolution for a full week.

  Then Bella got him drunk on free champagne at a restaurant opening—and if he did with Bella, then why not with Miss Martin?

  And Helga was sulking slightly, as if thanks were not sufficient recompense for her ironing of his shirts and the folding of his socks in the neat Continental way, not the angry convo- luting inside-way the English had.

  Eight weeks. The baby’s heart beat strongly now. The inner ears were growing fast, although they still showed no external part. The face had nostrils and a recognisable mouth and black pigmentation where the eyes were to be. Elbows, shoulders, hips and knees were apparent. The spine moved of its own volition for the first time, although fractionally. The length of the foetus was two point two centimetres. There was no apparent room within for the soul which gave grace to its being.

  Mabs, or so she thought, knew everything there was to know about Liffey. She certainly knew about Liffey’s new poverty. Liffey used Mabs’s telephone, having none of her own; and if she wished to be private had to walk a mile to the public call-box at Poldyke, a manual exchange, where it so happened that the operator was a friend of Mabs’s. Letters to and from Liffey were left at Cadbury Farm, for the postman would not walk up the track, and Mabs was not above steaming open any she thought interesting. Shop-assistant friends gave an account of what Liffey purchased, and the doctor’s receptionist, also a friend, passed on details of her health.

  “She’s having to learn to live like anyone else,” said Mabs smugly, observing that Liffey now bought groceries much as anyone else did, and that her order at the butcher’s was for mince and sausage, no longer fillet steak and stewing veal. “Her Richard won’t like that!”

  And it was true that Richard did not like it very much. The euphoria of his compassion and tenderness faded; difficulties, so bravely anticipated and overcome in principle, remained in detail to plague and depress him. With the merest suspicion in the mind that Liffey’s skinny, shabby clothes might be chosen because they were cheap, she stopped looking chic and looked dowdy instead. Her cooking—when she was obliged to use inexpensive ingredients and was deprived of the cream and brandy she liked to add to everything, from soup to stewed apples—was not as seductive as before. And what Richard had construed in Liffey as sexual delicacy now seemed rather more like sexual limitation, for without a doubt what had occurred to Liffey had occurred to Richard too—that once a wife is financially dependent, she is sexually dependent too. Richard felt by that token the more in a position to criticise.

  He cherished Liffey, of course he did, but no longer quite as an equal. He was almost sorry for her; he came down at the weekends because he ought, not because he wanted to. Nothing was said: the movement in their relationship was slight, too slight to find voice, but both sensed it.

  Now he was rich and she was poor.

  Mabs knew it and she was glad.

  Mabs knew everything about Liffey except what she could not know—that Liffey’s baby had spoken to her, settled clear and bright inside her, and promised that everything would be all right. That Liffey now had powers of her own, that Mabs could no longer have Nature all her own way, that forces worked for Liffey too and not just for Mabs. Winter winds were on Mabs’s side, and frost, and lightning and storms. Liffey loved sun, and breeze, and warmth; and they loved her. And spring was coming.

  Danger

  Tucker put the cows on Liffey’s side of the stream held. One of them was pregnant. It bellowed and groaned one misty evening. It lay down, it shuddered, it jerked its limbs and arched its neck. It rolled its eyes in a terrifying manner, showing an expanse of red-veined white. Could any eye on earth be so large? A single leg, Liffey was horrified to see, stuck out from under its tail. A single leg, a calf’s leg, in a frozen wave to the world, as if a frame of a him had been frozen. Blackish mucus gushed out around it even as Liffey looked, and with it came a stench strong and disagreeable. Liffey looked and gasped and ran, crying for Mabs and Tucker.

  Tucker was out. But Mabs was in the kitchen, watching television. She took a long time deciding what to do, whether to wait for Tucker or call the vet, and then finally came herself, pulling on a long pair of rubber gloves. Together they set off back up the lane. Liffey wanted to go back inside the cottage, but Mabs wouldn’t let her.

  “Why don’t you watch? It’s always nice to watch animals being born.”

  But it wasn’t. The calf was dead when Mabs pulled it out by its emergent leg, tugging and grunting, while the cow lowed and moaned. When the calf’s head came out, it was putrid— pulpy and liqueous. Then the cow heaved and groaned and

  “Three hundred pounds down the drain,” said Mabs, furious. “At least she wasn’t a good milker or it would have been nearer four.”

  And she left cow and calf lying there and walked back to the cottage with Liffey. Liffey composed herself as best she could: she felt sick and wanted to sleep, but Mabs wanted to talk, it seemed.

  “So you’re going through with your baby,” Mabs said.

  “Of course,” said Liffey, surprised.

  “I’d have thought you’d have waited until you and your Richard are more settled.”

  “Why?”

  Mabs just shrugged, and Liffey felt, for once, wary, and as if forces she was not quite in control of were abroad, and dangerous. Supposing what happened to the calf happened to her baby? She wished she had not seen it.

  Liffey feared the contagion of ill-fortune, as pregnant women do. Oh, show me no bad sights, sing me no harsh songs, let good fairies only cluster around the baby’s cradle.

  “Nothing to a termination these days,” said Mabs. “Girls I know have it done in order to get away on holiday in peace. They don’t mind a bit, up at the hospital. Funny thing, that cow that just died. Her fourth calf, and still something can go wrong. We mostly lose them first time round. Just like people. First babies are always the trickiest. Longer labours, that’s what does it.”

  Liffey folded her mind around the baby to guard it.

  “I couldn’t possibly have a te
rmination,” said Liffey.

  Mabs did not like the firmness of Liffey’s response. Liffey’s baby, she began to feel, might be harder to get rid of than she had imagined. She felt it more and more acutely as the sup- planter of her own, product of some process set up by Tucker and so stolen from her. She despised Liffey for a fool; she despised the baby for choosing where it had to grow. She smiled warmly at Liffey, dispelling most of Liffey’s doubts but not all. Liffey, for once, had noticed Mabs’s ill-will.

  “You’d better get up to the doctor soon,” said Mabs. “You look a little peaky.”

  “I’ll wait a bit,” said Liffey, and spoke gently, and smiled, as people do when they sense danger and know better than to aggravate it, and went inside her cottage.

  Mabs stood, still in bloodied rubber gloves and thick muddied Wellingtons, and stared after her for a little, and then moved off towards Cadbury Farm.

  The lane was very, very old. The hedges were so high that in summer they would form a tunnel of green. Earthworks and barrows stood at the summit of the hill above the cottage. Here the people of the Bronze Ages had lived and died, worked their magic and honoured their dead, until the Iron Age invaders had arrived and driven them out, and lived off a past that was none of their own. Once messengers had hurried up and down the lane with good news and more often bad, and mothers at their coming had clutched their children to them, and fathers wondered how to turn ploughshares into swords, and stood there wondering too long.

  Liffey stood in the kitchen and watched Mabs plod away, and wondered why she was afraid, and realised of course it was the dead calf and the dying cow that had upset her. Unreasonable to blame Mabs for what was Nature’s fault.

  At about the same time as Liffey witnessed the death of the cow, Richard was obliged to rescue the Nash’s cat from the gutter, where a passing car had flung it to die. In the end he could not nerve himself to pick the animal up, fancying its dead eye was glaring at him, and while he was hesitating, Helga, with alarming speed, came running out of the house, scooped the remains up into a plastic bag and dumped them into the dustbin, and got back to her cleaning as if nothing had happened. Richard was sick.

  Liffey rang her mother and told her the news.

  “I suppose you know what you’re doing,” said Madge. “Is it what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” asked Madge disconcertingly.

  “I suppose because it’s natural,” said Liffey brightly.

  “So are varicose veins,” said Madge.

  “It’s not as if I had a career,” said Liffey tentatively over the crackling line to her mother far away. “It’s not as if I was good at anything else. I might as well use up my time having a baby. I might even be a born mother.”

  “Not if you take after me,” said Madge, which might almost have counted as an apology. “Aren’t you too frightened? You know what you’re like about pain.”

  Liffey realised at that moment that she would never, ever, receive her mother’s whole-hearted approval. Marks would be given, but marks would always be taken away. Six out of ten for overcoming cowardice: three out of ten for indulging her own nature and having a baby: and there she was, with an average of four and a half out of ten, when a pass-mark to mother’s love was five.

  So we live, as daughters; and as mothers are astonished that we elicit the same sad anxiety from our progeny. It was not how we meant it to be when we dandled them on our knees.

  “So you’re having a baby in the country,” said Madge, “while Richard works in London. Is that wise?”

  “It’s what has to be,” said Liffey. “Not what I want. As soon as Richard gets Mory and Helen out of the apartment we’ll be together again.”

  “You could afford something else,” said Madge. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Liffey did not want to hear the note of relish in the mother’s voice when she complained about the money; she put it off.

  “I like it down here,” said Liffey, and a ray of sun broke through the clouds, and she knew that it was true. Only that some danger lay across the land like a sword.

  Madge hiccuped on the other end of the line, and Liffey wondered if she were drunk again, and along with the dreary everyday feeling that she had failed to live up to her mother’s expectation of her, there now travelled another strand, sharply painful: of anxiety for her mother’s welfare. The fear of the child, back from school, whose footstep hesitates at the gate of the house, wondering what’s to be found within. Liffey remembered that too. Her heart beat faster, her hand trembled, tears started in her eyes.

  “It’s all right,” said the baby suddenly and unexpectedly. “All that is past. Be calm, be still.”

  And Liffey was, and Mabs, listening in on the extension, knowing only what was available to her to know, wondered why the tone of her voice changed.

  “Why don’t you come down and stay?” asked Liffey. “It’s going to be so lovely now spring is coming.”

  “I was never one for Nature,” said Madge presently, cautiously, “or for family either. But I suppose it is the kind of thing a mother is expected to do. Once you’re given a label you never escape it. I’ll come down presently if I can find the time.”

  Liffey, to be hung for a sheep as well as a lamb, telephoned Richard’s parents.

  “A baby!” cried Mrs. Lee-Fox, “how wonderful.” But in her voice Liffey could hear shock and despair. Now Richard and Liffey were married for good, for ever: they had joined not as children join, for fun and games, but as man and wife, together, as parents, to face trouble and hard times. Mrs. Lee- Fox was in danger of losing her son.

  Liffey wondered if she had always heard the other voice, the tone that lies behind the words and betrays them—and if she had heard, why had she not listened? Perhaps she listened now with the baby’s budding ears? And certainly this disagreeable acuity of hearing diminished within a week or two, perhaps because Liffey could not for long endure her new sensitivity to the ifs and buts in Richard's voice when he assured her he loved her: perhaps because the matter of hearing was, once properly established, less in the air so far as the baby was concerned.

  Mrs. Lee-Fox handed Liffey over to Mr. Lee-Fox, who repeated his wife’s enthusiasm, and the phone, following a misunderstanding as to who was actually to talk to whom, went down rather abruptly. Liffey did not telephone back.

  Mabs put down the extension and called Liffey into the kitchen for a cup of tea.

  Later in the week Mabs sent Tucker up with some new-laid eggs from her hens. Tucker smiled at Liffey in a friendly and ordinary manner and did not outstay his cup of tea and biscuit.

  Liffey^ used two of the eggs for breakfast the following day. On the mornings she did not feel sick she felt extremely hungry, with a kind of devouring, non-selective hunger, as if already feeling the need to stock up now for hard times ahead. This was one of the hungry mornings, when she was glad Richard was not about, to witness her greed.

  The first egg plopped perfectly out of its shell into the pan, the ball of orange yolk held firmly in a strong white. The second fell out in a runny, smelly, thin flow, yolk and white already mingled, leaving the inside of the shell stained a yellowy green, and spread across the bottom of the pan with unbelievable speed, so that the first egg was contaminated.

  Liffey’s heart beat, her hand flew to her mouth. She knew beyond doubt that Mabs had sent a message of ill-will. Her earlier doubt of Mabs had been transitory, had been washed away by civility, smiles and cups of tea. And as Richard had pointed out, to ask a barely pregnant woman to witness the delivery of a dead calf may be tactless but can hardly be called a conspiracy. And he had laughed, and Liffey had tried, and managed, to laugh too.

  The reasonable part of Liffey told her that she was being absurd, that an added egg sent by a neighbour is a mistake, not an attack; she assured herself that Mabs had no reason to dislike her, that what had passed between her and Tucker was over, secret, and of no consequence, and that Mabs was truly the frien
d she seemed. The other, unreasonable part of Liffey cried out in wild alarm and would not be pacified. Her sins would find her out.

  Liffey was not accustomed to being unfaithful. She did not suffer, as did many of her married women friends, from sudden overwhelming sexual passions for this inappropriate person or that. She was not practiced, as they were, in the arts of forgetting, and self-justification and mendacity. Liffey tried to forget and could not. She tried to justify and failed. She wanted to tell Richard, but the longer the time that passed between the event and the confession, the more difficult that became, and the more occasions on which she and Richard, Mabs and Tucker were in the same room, sharing the same conversation, the same meal, the more implicit deceit there must be in her silence and the more difficult it was to break.

  It came to Liffey that she and Mabs were linked, through Tucker, in the mind in a more compelling and complex way than ever she and Tucker had been in the flesh. It flitted through her consciousness that this was perhaps what Mabs had intended, but so fleetingly the notion did not take root, did not settle, did not open itself up for contemplation. Liffey continued to feel uneasy, as people do, when clues are offered, and in the interests of peace of mind and self respect, ignored.

  Liffey walked to Poldyke and rang Richard from the phone- box there, and Miss Martin graciously allowed them to speak.

  “Richard,” said Liffey, “do you think Mabs could be a witch?”

  Now, Richard was in a meeting with a marketing man who wanted money to set up a feasibility study on the subject of community salinity centres, which he, Richard, could not recommend. When Liffey asked her question he already felt much practiced in patience and answered politely and quietly. “No, Liffey, I don’t. What are your reasons for suggesting it?”

  “She sent up some rotten eggs this morning saying they were fresh.”

  “Liffey,” said Richard reasonably, “it is hard even for a farmer’s wife to know what is going on inside an egg.”