Weldon, Fay - Novel 07

by Puffball (v1. 1)

  And there was of course the one great hazard to the baby’s survival, still undiagnosed by the outside world, in the fact that the baby’s placenta, now fast forming, had lodged in the uterine wall beneath the foetus instead of to one side of it. For here the chorionic villi of the fertilised egg had clawed and stuck, and now, where they had first attached, were developing with vast speed into the complexity of the placenta, which was linking itself-with arteries to the foetus, separating the mother’s circulation from the baby’s, selectively transferring to the baby oxygen, carbohydrates, fatty acids, proteins, amino acids, vitamins and essential elements, removing excreted products, carbon dioxide and urea for the mother to dispose of through her own system—but also, alas, by virtue of its unusual position, blocking the baby’s eventual path to the outside world.

  It was as if the fertilised egg, on its way out of Liffey’s uterus, had grabbed its last chance—clung where it could and not where it ought. A lucky, hopeful, still surviving baby.

  Upsets

  Richard wrote to Liffey in the middle of the fifteenth week.

  It’s ridiculous, we really ought to get a telephone. I’ve been promoted and I can’t even ring you to tell you! £60 extra a month! Of course tax will take £30, but never mind. When the baby comes, at least we’ll get an allowance for that. Only another six weeks, when the summer train services begin, and I’ll come down mid-week as well as weekends.

  Liffey cried. She had expected that Richard would commute every day once the summer came. So had he once upon a time. But circumstances changed.

  “I’m now Junior Product Manager on Beesnees Soup,” wrote Richard in a letter that was delivered by Audrey and bypassed Mabs:

  It’s a real challenge: the salinity factor has yet to be solved. It means a certain amount of travelling to factories, sales conferences and so on, but at least all in the country. The jet-set life comes later! Darling, I’m afraid I have to be in Edinburgh this weekend, so do look after yourself. And please try and make some friends—you keep yourself much too much on your own. Shall I ask your mother to come down? I hope you’re seeing something of Mabs and Tucker, they’re real friends to you—you mustn’t get all funny about them, the way you sometimes do. I’m enclosing £20 for food and so on. Now be careful and write down what you spend. You know what you’re like.

  Love, in haste, Richard

  “Isn’t Richard coming home this weekend?” asked Mabs that Saturday morning, bringing round a drop of cider for Richard to try. She and Tucker did not drink cider themselves, finding it a sour and disagreeable drink, but they knew that Richard delighted in it, detecting species of apples and vintages as he drank, with an interest and knowledge that country people seldom displayed.

  “Richard’s away on business. He’s been promoted. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “But what about the cider?” Mabs seemed quite disappointed.

  “I’d like to try it,” offered Liffey.

  “It wouldn’t do you any good,” said Mabs, “in your condition.”

  But Liffey insisted and tasted it there and then, and presently, quite liking it, drank a glass or two more, and later that night had an uprush of sexual desire that disconcerted her. Had Tucker put in an appearance, she would have unlocked the door to him, but Tucker did not: Mabs entwined her long legs around Tucker’s middle and held him fast.

  While Richard, in and out of Miss Martin, passed through the wilds of Cumberland on the way to Edinburgh, Bella and Ray went together to a newly opened fish restaurant in Fulham.

  “There’s nothing wrong with what I feel for Karen,” said Ray. “I don’t want you to think that, Bella. I don’t want to upset you.”

  “The only thing that upsets me,” said Bella, “is your taste. Why don’t you fuck her and get it over?”

  Bella rose and left the restaurant, but not before slipping twelve oysters into a plastic bag.

  “Where are you taking those?”

  “Home to the children.”

  Bella forgot to put the oysters in the refrigerator when she got home and left them on the kitchen table. The cat, an instant replacement for the one run over, ate them, and was found ill to the point of death the next morning, and had to be taken by Helga to the vet. It was a journey of two miles, but Bella would not let Helga take a taxi. She had to walk.

  “The vet’s bill’s going to be bad enough, let alone a taxi!”

  “Don’t think I’m going to pay the bloody vet’s bill,” said Ray to Bella, but absently, without acrimony. Really, he could think of little else than Karen: her long, somehow unformed legs, her plump, smooth face, still unmarked by woe and indecision, her little hands, the way she moved about the world, choosing between one happy option and the next, living by choice and not necessity.

  The cat died in the carrier bag on the way to the vet. Helga did not cry, but Tony and Tina did when they heard the news.

  “Supposing it had been us?” asked Tony. “The oysters were meant for us.”

  Everything seemed upset that weekend. Routines were altered, and not for the better. That Saturday night Carol told her husband that she was going over to Mabs’s, and made him a nice cup of tea before she went. He did not drink the tea, since the shepherd’s pie she’d made had given him indigestion —the onion was still raw, the mince lumpy and the flour thickening barely cooked—and as a result did not fall asleep over Match of the Day. He heard mice nibbling and rustling, and rang Mabs to ask to speak to Carol, and Tucker answered and said no, Carol hadn’t been round. Funny, thought Barry, but quite soon Carol came back and said she hadn’t gone up to Mabs’s after all but had stopped by her mum’s, who was having trouble with a bee swarm. The fright, or suspicion, or unease, or whatever it was that had churned round in his heavy, kindly, trusting mind stirred him strangely, and he paused in the middle of his swift, embarrassed, usually silent love-making and asked his wife if she loved him.

  “Of course I do,” she said.

  “Idiot,” said Mabs to Tucker when she finally got back to bed. “I had to run all the way down to Hubbard’s office. Haven’t I got enough to do?”

  “I’m not going to tell lies for anyone,” said Tucker. “Especially not for your sister, who is a married woman but having it off with Dick Hubbard.”

  “She fancies him,” said Mabs. “She can’t help herself. And Dick Hubbard’s more use to us than Barry ever will be. Thank your lucky stars it’s you I fancy, Tucker.”

  “It’d better be,” said Tucker, “or I’d knock his bloody head off, whoever he was. Yours too.”

  He would have, as well.

  In other rooms at Cadbury Farm, Mabs’s children slept, uneasily. They were left-over children, out-grown their usefulness as Mabs’s babies, left to get on with their lives as best they could. Eddie, of all of them, wouldn’t accept his fate. He would sidle up to his mother and nuzzle into her crotch, as if trying to get back in. All it did was disgust her. She disliked him for his soppy ways, his running nose, his watery eyes and the dull reproach therein. The others were tougher, or more sensible, and kept their distance and grabbed the baked beans, and shut their eyes and minds to night-time visions of strange people who belonged to long ago. There had been a farm on the site when the Romans came, and uncooperative people there who had to be killed to be quieted, but still weren’t quiet.

  To Tucker the children were part of the landscape, like the cows and the farm and the dogs. He hoped that when the boys grew bigger they would help on the farm. He did not see how the girls could be much use to him. Cattle were fed a carefully calculated amount in terms of cost and nourishment, in order to return a profit in milk and meat yield. Sometimes it cost too much to keep the animals alive, and then it was best to slaughter. You knew where you were with animals. But the girls just ate and ate and grew and grew, and what return was there in that? Some other man would presently have the benefit of them. To nurture girls seemed to Tucker an absurd philanthropy.

  Mabs slept. Tucker couldn’t.


  Better, thought Tucker, Mabs dreaming beside him, to satisfy the pleasure of begetting via some other man’s purse— Liffey’s body, Richard’s income. Richard was a good enough man on a fine day in a rich season, but not much use when the cold wind blew. In the meantime there was something to be learned from Richard—the fresh wind of new ideas. He could feel them ruffling the surface of his mind. And such was Tucker’s sense of mastery, via Liffey’s body, Liffey’s baby (which he had come to assume, if only from Mabs’s attitude, was his), that he could condescend to Richard secretly—while Richard condescended to him openly. Tucker thought he would visit Liffey again, before long, so she did not forget.

  Tucker grew sleepy. He saw the world was composed of virgin ground, of furrows waiting to be ploughed. Seed to be dropped, watered, nourished, then to grow. That was the wonder of it. Perhaps if Mabs was to have her baby, visiting Liffey again was not a good idea. Perhaps a man used his fertility up: burying himself too often in already fertilised ground might weaken his capacity. Tucker would resist the temptation, which was, after all, not the temptation of the flesh but the temptation of laughing at Richard—who spoke well, wrote well, thought well, earned well, dressed well, but could not look after a wife.

  Tucker laughed and slept.

  The sun, rising in the east, sent streams of early light westward and caught the Tor in brilliance beneath lowering dawn clouds.

  Sixteen Weeks

  The baby weighed five ounces and was six inches long. It had limbs with working joints, and fingers and toes, each with its completing nail. It was clearly male. It lay curled in its am- niotic sac, legs crossed, knees up towards its lowered head, which it sheltered with little arms. Its lifeline, the umbilical cord, curled round from its stomach and into the nourishing placenta. The baby stirred, and moved, and exercised, according to its own will and not its mother’s: a little being within a greater being, grown out of it, and from it, but now itself, no longer part of the greater whole. It moved, but Liffey could not detect the movements: she would have to wait another month or so for that.

  It was time to see the doctor again. Liffey remarked on it to Mabs.

  “You look healthy enough to me,” said Mabs.

  “They like you to have a check-up every month,” said Liffey.

  “They like to claim their various allowances,” said Mabs, “and keep their clinics open and their hies full of forms, and if they’re men they like peeking up your insides. Is it Dr. Southey you have? Tucker won’t let me see him. They got him for indecent assault up in London. That’s why he’s working down here.”

  The baby laughed, amused. Liffey heard.

  “And when you think of that thalidomide business,” said Mabs, “I think it’s best to keep out of their way. Those poor little babies with flippers. Baby kicking yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  All the same, Liffey used the telephone to make the appointment, and Mabs was annoyed. Liffey was proving more difficult to control than she had thought possible. The way to bring her back to heel of course would be to send Tucker down again, but that was now out of the question. Mabs felt hollow and cold in her insides. She missed the movement of the kicks and shruggings of an unborn child. Tucker filled her up a little from time to time, but it was not enough. And if Tucker went to Liffey, ploughed about in those already warm and packed places, she might find herself trying to kill the baby by killing the mother. And that she recognised would be wicked. The baby, being Tucker’s, was hers to kill. Liffey was not.

  Mabs offered to drive Liffey into the surgery.

  Liffey declined.

  “The walk will do me good.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Mabs, and Liffey felt she had behaved ungraciously. Liffey had recovered from her earliest uneasiness about Mabs. She now looked to her, as a pregnant girl will to an older and more experienced woman, for advice, company and reassurance. She recognised that the advice was often bad and the reassurance marred by a blunt tactlessness, but she did not doubt Mabs’s good will.

  All the same, if she could help it, she did not travel in Mabs’s car. Mabs’s driving frightened her, and the way she was jolted over the rutted tracks made her worry for the baby, and there was something about the car itself that worried her. She thought it was haunted.

  Cadbury Farm too was haunted, but in a more positive way. It was suffused with a sense of activity, both past and present. It had sprung out of the ground two thousand or so years ago, had fallen down, been raised again, been added to, a new beam put here, a rotten one replaced there, the generations passing the while; children born, others dying, genes shifting and sorting all the time within, languidly, but to a steady, beating, almost cheerful purpose. But the Pierce’s car had none of this richness. It sopped up the energies of its occupants—Tucker’s fixed and narrow will, Mabs’s flourishing discontent, the children’s sly and secretive passions—and all to no purpose except the eventual disintegration of plastic upholstery and the rusting of metal parts.

  Dr. Southey thought Liffey looked puffier and heavier than she ought. She seemed tired and anxious.

  “Wouldn’t you be better off back in London with your husband?”

  “There are problems about that.”

  “What sort?”

  “Oh, just practical. Not matrimonial.” She believed it too. “Anyway, I love the country.”

  “In what way?”

  “It makes me feel more important.” She had the capacity to surprise him. He looked forward to her visits.

  She lay on the couch, her stomach bare. Her uterus, normally hidden away in the pelvis, had now risen to a point halfway between her pubic mound and her umbilicus. His hand felt it out. He thought her dates were correct: the uterus was at the expected height for sixteen weeks.

  “I have pains in my side,” she said, “low down.”

  “They’ll go away.”

  “What are they?”

  The pains were caused by the shrinking of the corpus luteum of her ovaries—no longer required to produce the progesterone that had inhibited the shedding of the uterus wall during the first months of her pregnancy. The placenta had taken over the task. It was a sign that all was well, not bad. He said as much.

  “You’re sure it’s nothing wrong?” she insisted.

  “Of course it’s not.”

  “I do worry about it. I’m not used to worrying. I used to leave it to Richard to do the worrying. He always worried about his parents, if there was nothing else. Now he seems to have stopped and I’ve started.”

  She laughed, rather nervous and embarrassed, reminding him of a hen gone broody, changing its nature from something greedy and silly into something prepared to die rather than expose its eggs to harm, looking out at the world with a stubborn, desperate wisdom. And for what? To lead ten fluffy chicks back into the hen coop—and forget them a week or so later.

  “Is there any treatment?” Liffey asked.

  “The passage of time,” he said. “Come and see me next week if you’re still worried.”

  Liffey went home.

  The pains went. Others came. Liffeys’ ovaries were enlarged and developed a series of small cysts, which may have accounted for some of the fleeting pains. Her vaginal secretions increased; she passed water frequently.

  “Yes, but why?” She made a special journey to ask him.

  “I don’t know,” he said impatiently. “These things just happen to pregnant ladies.”

  He was busy: he had two patients with terminal cancer. He wished he could keep his respect for pregnant women. They seemed to him to belong so completely to the animal kingdom that it was almost strange to hear them talk.

  The weather turned cold. A wet west wind blew day after day and took the blossom from the trees.

  Liffey’s body, which normally contained ten pints of blood, now had some twelve pints coursing through it, the better to supply her uterus and markedly swelling breasts, but diluting the concentration of red cells therein. Liffey became anaemic.

>   Mabs knew Liffey was anaemic, because Carol’s friend worked in the laboratory at Glastonbury and did the blood counts. The doctor prescribed Liffey iron tablets, and she took them, although they gave her indigestion.

  Mabs felt that time was working for her. Mabs comforted herself with the thought that perhaps all she need do was wait, and the baby would leave of its own free will, and natural justice would be served.

  “Why are you hiccuping?” Richard asked.

  Sometimes he worried for Liffey’s health, in case the punishment of the gods was diverted from him to her. He was having altogether too good a time.

  “It’s the iron pills. I don’t think I’ll take them any more.”

  “Don’t be irresponsible, Liffey. You ought to be thinking of the baby, not yourself.”

  Richard had a few bad weekends after that. His skies clouded over for no apparent reason. Nothing had changed, of course, except his attitude to them. He was concerned for Liffey and her baby, and now his concern afflicted him. There were enough things in the world to worry about, surely, without the gratuitous addition of another? Parents, job, income, the car, accommodation—worries heaped in upon him one upon another. Wives, surely, were meant to decrease the load of anxiety, not increase it with anaemia, with hiccuping and puffy eyes and the threat of the thing within? Miss Martin implied as much all week. Hard to throw it off at weekends.

  The curse of the irrational, moreover, descended upon him. He dug the garden, he planted peas and beans; he hammered and painted when he meant to do nothing but rest and relax and compare cider and home-made wines with Tucker. He saw that the chains of fatherhood were already around him: he was preparing for the baby. As well be a humble cock-sparrow lurching to and fro, to and fro, straw in the beak for the nest, exhausted, bored and foolish, helpless in the face of his nature. Richard pulled a muscle in his back, and blamed Liffey.