Weldon, Fay - Novel 07

by Puffball (v1. 1)

  Liffey accepted Richard’s version of events. She was a stay- at-home wife, she had already begun to believe he knew best. She just looked at the weather from out of her window: he journeyed into strange places, and knew many things, and understood them all.

  “If you don’t mind, Liffey,” he said, “I am rather busy,” so she put the telephone down, and he reproved Miss Martin mildly for putting through a telephone call while he was in a meeting. Miss Martin wept secretly because he had reproved her, but her heart leapt at this rebuff of Liffey. Perhaps, she thought, he was at last beginning to see Liffey for what she was. Foolish, empty and useless.

  Carol, in the telephone exchange, dialled through to Mabs to report.

  Later in the morning Mabs came up to Liffey and said she did hope, the eggs had been all right; one of the hens had been laying outside the nesting box, and Audrey had found the cache and had not told her until after Tucker had come up with them.

  Mabs smiled and chatted about husbands and elm trees and babies and said it was high time Liffey went to see the doctor, wasn’t it, and Liffey agreed and realised she was being silly about Mabs, who was a good friend, just sometimes tactless.

  “What was all that about witches?” asked Richard at the weekend.

  “Just a silly idea,” said Liffey. “One gets silly ideas when pregnant.”

  Mabs asked them over for supper.

  “Let’s not go,” said Liffey. “We haven’t really got all that much in common.”

  But Richard wanted to go.

  “You wanted to live in the country,” said Richard. “I would have thought you could find plenty in common. It’s not as if you were the greatest intellect in the world, Liffey.”

  He had come home on Friday, resisting the temptation to stay over with Bella for a smoked-salmon festival, because he had been a little worried by his brief and surprising exchange with Liffey on the telephone. Now, since she seemed perfectly well and cheerful, he resented having made the sacrifice. He found it difficult to wind down on Friday evenings. He found himself looking round for people to confide in, or chivvy, or engage in argument or sexual provocation, while Liffey wanted him to sit quietly and stroke her hair as if they were some still- life of a young married couple. By Saturday he wanted to do nothing but sit and recover, while Liffey wanted him to be out mowing or digging or painting; and on Sunday he waited for the evening, passing the time with the Sunday papers, so that he could return to London and real life.

  It would be better, he told himself, when Mory and Helen were eased out of the apartment and Liffey and he were together again. He would not need Bella or Miss Martin then. He would not have to justify his infidelities by finding fault with Liffey. He could still see some kind of future for them both— even a rosy one; it was just the present he found difficult, and in particular Friday evenings.

  “You’re never at your nicest on Fridays,” observed Liffey.

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  “But not too tired to go up to Mabs and Tucker’s?”

  “No,” said Richard.

  There was something different about Richard these days, thought Liffey. A kind of snap of power, a glint of ice behind the boyish eyes: she saw that he might indeed become something significant in his organisation. She was not sure she wanted that. They were to have roamed together, hand in hand for ever, through the long tangled grasses of life.

  She sat at Mabs’s dinner table and felt frail, and rather ill and tired, while Richard and Tucker talked about fertilisers, about which Richard was surprisingly knowledgeable, and milk yields, and Mabs urged Liffey to eat up the gristly, fatty lumps of pork in her plateful of meat stew. Richard thought how peaky Liffey looked and had a sudden longing for Miss Martin’s solid plumpness. He caught Liffey’s eye, and she smiled at him, and there was a quality of sadness in her smile, as if she mourned a lost innocence.

  Resolutions

  “Bella,” said Richard later in the week, “all this is getting on top of me. It has to stop. It’s not as if it were love.”

  Bella just laughed. It was not easy to hurt Bella. She sat on top of him, breasts full and firm, swaying backwards and forwards calmly and slowly and smoking a cigarette, which he supposed was ridiculous but nevertheless appealed to him.

  “If it were love,” said Bella, “I wouldn’t be doing it. Love hurts. This is just sex.”

  Richard’s feelings were wounded. He thought she ought to love him. He thought that her not loving him might be dangerous, making him more inclined to love her. He would wait until she loved him, and then, having given her back a whole range of feelings she had forgotten that she had, would quietly and gently leave. That was what a man could, and did, do for an older woman.

  He could wait until Miss Martin was out of love with him, and then quietly and gently leave her. That was what a kindly man did when the object of someone else’s unrequited love. Richard wanted to do his best for everyone.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Fox rang Richard and said they’d pay for Liffey to have her baby as a private patient so she didn’t have to go through the ordeal of a public ward.

  It was a light, friendly, easy telephone conversation—one parent on each of two telephone extensions. Richard knew it had taken them a good week of urgent, desperate, anxious conversation, planning and sleeplessness to achieve this ease and unanimity. So major decisions had always been dropped into his life. First closed doors, raised voices kept determinedly low, the feeling of agitation and argument in the house, then bombshells presented like grapenuts at breakfast. You’re going to boarding school. We’re going away: you’re to stay with Aunt Betty. We’ve written to your school—you’re having extra tutoring.

  “Not in front of the child,” the Lee-Fox’s had agreed on their honeymoon—both having been the victims of naked parental conflict. Never in front of the children. Our child, as it turned out to be. Had it been children, such resolutions might have been abandoned.

  Richard at his office was a great protagonist of open decision-making. His every thought, his every conclusion, his every action was recorded by Miss Martin and circulated throughout the department. Never, thought Miss Martin, was there an office from which streamed so many memos and minutes.

  “We’ll hide nothing from our child,” Richard said to Liffey on one of the rare occasions he spoke about their coming baby. “We won’t let happen to it what happened to me.”

  He passed on the news of his parents’ offer to Liffey.

  “Have it privately?” Liffey was unenthusiastic, thus surprising Richard. “No. I’d rather have it like anyone else. I don’t want to be thought special. I’m not.”

  So then Richard had to ring his parents back, and in refusing their offer sound both ungracious and ungrateful.

  “No,” said Bella darkly, nibbling Richard’s ear. “I don’t think this is the dawn of social conscience in Liffey. I think it is selfinterest. In private wards you bleed to death by yourself. At least in the public wards there are other patients there to help you.”

  “You’re not at all nice about Liffey,” complained Richard. “You should remember I’m married to her and be more tactful. Don’t you feel in the least guilty about her? You are taking what is hers by rights.”

  “No man is the rightful property of any woman, and vice versa.”

  “But you’re liberated. I thought Liffey was supposed to be your sister.”

  “So she is. She is welcome to Ray any time she likes. Perhaps she would like to come and stay for the weekend?”

  “I don’t want Liffey anywhere near this house,” said Richard with some passion, but Bella curled her tongue around his, and although the texture of her flesh between his thighs did not have the resilience of Liffey’s or the firm solidity of Miss Martin’s, it had a kind of practiced feel, as if sexual impulses travelled a well-worn, easy path, coming and going with conviction; and marvelling at this, he stopped worrying about Liffey.

  Miss Martin was not so outspoken when it came to her feel
ings towards Liffey. She confined her comments to “um”s and “welf’s and “I see”s, but timed them so that Richard would begin to see Liffey as Miss Martin saw her—as someone damaging to his professional, emotional, financial and physical well-being. I am one of the world’s givers, said Miss Martin, by her very lack of sexual response, lying beneath Richard in hotel or board room or cloakroom; I am not one of the world’s takers. Not like Liffey.

  Liffey, whom she had never seen. Liffey, the boss’s wife. Above her in status, the marriage partner, not the concubine. Concubines travel through the house by night, with long needles to plunge into the hearts of wives. They kill, if they can, through love, spite and anger mixed.

  Investigations

  Eleven weeks. Liffey’s baby had eyes beneath solid eyelids, a nose and rudimentary hands and feet. It weighed two grams. It lay safely in a sac of amniotic fluid. It rocked as Liffey walked.

  Liffey felt that her baby was sufficiently rooted in the world to stand a little classification and investigation, of a scientific and medical nature, and made an appointment to see Dr. Southey on his weekly visit to Crossley.

  Mabs kindly drove Liffey in, but mistook the time of the doctor’s first appointment and did not wait to check that the surgery was open, so that Liffey had to wait in the cold and rain for nearly an hour.

  Dr. Southey, the same young man who had once nearly run Liffey over in a car that appeared too big for him, was serious, kind and well trained in psychosomatic medicine.

  When he reproached Liffey for not having attended earlier she made reply, and he took her reluctance—How could she say that she had not wanted the baby frightened away?—as a sign that she was unenthusiastic about her pregnancy. And the fact that she was cold to the touch reinforced his sense of unease. She was reluctant to be examined internally, and he suspected that she was neurotic.

  “Why did you have to do that? What did you discover?” she demanded.

  “That your dates are about right, that there are no tumours or abnormalities of your pelvis, no major infections, no ulcers on your cervix, and that the size of the pelvic cavity and its outlet are reasonable.”

  “You mean I have minor infections.”

  He sighed.

  “Giving information to pregnant women is impossible,” he said. “All I mean is, if you have minor infections, I cannot detect them.”

  She looked at him, strong-chinned and mutinous, and he decided that he liked her. But that she was too thin.

  “I want all the information you have,” she said. “It’s my body and my baby, and I’m not a fool.”

  “I daresay not,” he said, “but that won’t stop you going into a grey depression because you misunderstand what I say. Better, in my experience, to say nothing. I took a cervical smear while I was about it.”

  “What makes you think I have cancer?” she demanded, and he laughed, thinking his point well made. Presently she smiled too, and after that they got on better.

  He took blood from a vein.

  “What’s that for?”

  “To see if you have syphilis.”

  “Is it going to be like this all the time? One indignity after another?” she asked presently, and he replied yes, that having babies was not the most dignified of processes. It was, he added, the ultimate triumph of the body over the mind.

  “And of desire,” she said, “over common sense.”

  He thought she meant sexual desire, but she did not. She meant the overwhelming desire, of which she was now so conscious, to be part of the world about her: to be a woman like other women; to feel herself part of nature’s process: to subdue the individual spirit to some greater whole. When now she knelt in the flower beds and crumbled the earth between her fingers to make a softer bed for a seedling, she felt she was the servant of Nature’s kingdom and not its mistress. And what sort of common sense was that?

  He asked her what she did all day.

  “I wait for my husband to come home at weekends,” she said. “I wait for the baby to grow. I garden, I think, I listen to the radio. I walk up to see Mabs, my friend. Sometimes I’m sick, and then I wait to feel better. I do a lot of waiting.”

  It occurred to him that she might have invented the husband, away in London; when she had gone he wrote a memo for the social worker to check.

  Liffey Lee-Fox, whom everyone had envied, now the object of compassion and concern! Mabs, hearing about the social worker from Ellen, the doctor’s receptionist, felt both gratified and annoyed. She asked Richard and Liffey over for Sunday lunch, and added mistletoe-tansy to Richard’s glass of nettle wine and a distillation of pure ergot to Liffey’s elderberry. Audrey, the previous autumn, had searched the heads of rye stalks for the violet-black grains with their fishy, peculiar odour, where the ergot fungus had attacked the grain. She had done well, and her grandmother had been able to prepare quite a quantity of fluid ergot, and told Audrey to tell her mother to use sixty drops if she wished to abort a baby. Audrey wasn’t listening properly and told Mabs to use six drops, and the dose had in fact a beneficent effect on Liffey’s system. She was twelve weeks’ pregnant; her period would in normal times have been due; she was suffering from a slight hormonal imbalance and on the verge of losing some of the uterine lining—a process that, once started, can continue until all the contents of the uterine cavity, baby and all, have been lost. The few drops of ergot caused the uterus to contract, but mildly, and Liffey’s condition being marginal, the bleeding stopped. Had her elderberry wine been fractionally more strongly dosed, the uterine contractions would have been powerful and Liffey would have miscarried.

  Richard, his entire system agitated by mistletoe poison, and mistaking his general restlessness for sexual ardour, wanted to make love to Liffey as soon as they arrived home, but she refused. Intercourse can be dangerous during pregnancy at the time of a threatened miscarriage—one contraction, as it were, leading to another—although at all other times in pregnancy it is perfectly safe—an hour before the baby is born, an hour after.

  Liffey refusing Richard again! It made him angry. He went home on Sunday evening—he now thought of London as home—and went to Bella’s bed, not she to the sofa in the study. Thus he defied the last of the proprieties. But where was Ray? At a discotheque with Karen—with one ear pierced by a silver earring. Bella had lost single earrings by the dozen over the decades, and could never bring herself to throw away the one remaining. Now Ray, following male teenage fashion, made good use of them.

  Mabs waited, and waited in vain, for Liffey to come running with news of blood and disaster. She could not understand it. Mabs looked at another full moon, and at the Tor, riding the skies beneath it.

  “I suppose it looks like a woman’s breast,” she said to Tucker. “And the tower on top is the nipple. Perhaps all those hippies are right, prancing about mother-naked up there. Do you think so, Tucker?”

  Alterations

  Tucker was not feeling so frightened of his wife. Mabs minded about his going with little Liffey, who was anyone’s for the asking; and being able to make Mabs mind made Tucker powerful.

  Mabs had noticed the change in Tucker and gone to her mother, who was already compounding a mixture of belladonna together with the bark and twigs of the Virginia Creeper that grew above Carol’s door, to ensure Tucker’s fidelity and sobriety. But Tucker was not to know that.

  Carol’s husband, Barry, was as unaware as Tucker of the changes in his nature brought about by his wife. It was Carol’s habit to mix foxglove pollen into the egg of his daily sandwiches, thus sparing herself from his sexual attentions. She herself took an infusion of lignum vitae—a hard and rare wood much imported from the West Indies in the nineteenth century and used for the axles of horse-drawn vehicles—dissolved in whisky, the better to respond to the advances of Dick Hubbard. The blacksmith at Poldyke had a few old lignum vitae timbers left, and in exchange for a kiss and a pinch and the promise of more was happy enough to let Carol scrape away at the black, hard, heavy wood. He coul
d not see how it harmed him, let alone benefited her.

  Carol and Mabs’s mother were now teaching Audrey her skills, and sometimes Mabs wondered if it was Audrey’s doing that she did not get pregnant in spite of the infusion of coca that she, Mabs, took daily and that made her sometimes visionary, so that Glastonbury Tor swam towards her through the sky. Perhaps it was the coca too that gave her frequent rages— a force that superseded the ordinary rules of cause and effect and sent her perceptions a little beyond the ordinary, piercing extra deeply into the crust of reality.

  Inside Mabs (1)

  But coca or not, visions or not, Mabs did not become pregnant. Tucker’s sperm swam obediently to meet her monthly ovum, and fertilised it well enough; the ovum dutifully developed the required chorionic villi with which to embed itself into the waiting uterine wall, but then proceeded at too lagardly a pace along the Fallopian tube, arriving in the cavity of the uterus eight days after fertilisation instead of the required seven, and by that time had ignobly perished for lack of a suitable foothold, or villihold.

  It would require a very special drug to meet such a specific need, and the drug was not coca.

  Inside Liffey (8)

  Thirteen weeks. Liffey’s waist thickened. She had to tug at her jeans to do them up. Her uterus was distending: the am- niotic sac within measured four inches in diameter and the foetus was three inches long. The baby’s face was properly formed: its body curled in an attitude of docility—resting, waiting, listening, growing. What it most needed now was time, which Liffey, through her love and caution, must supply.

  Twenty-seven weeks to go. The most dangerous days were over, for the baby’s organs had properly formed and no major congenital abnormality had become apparent—nor now was likely to—which might lead to miscarriage. Although the baby could still of course be expelled if the mother body for some reason or other rejected it—even though there was nothing in the baby’s own ordination, as it were, to lead to this sorry conclusion. But any drugs or infections introduced into the mother’s body would now have the barrier of the placental wall to cross and could harm only in extreme circumstances.