Weldon, Fay - Novel 07

by Puffball (v1. 1)

  Bella sent him to an osteopath, who made it better, and the next Friday, Richard returned to Honeycomb Cottage with a car loaded with food and drink, and was loving and kind and considerate.

  “We can’t go on living like this,” he said. “We don’t see nearly enough of each other. But, oh, Liffey, London is such a terrible place.” And he reeled off tales of vandalism and violence: a colleague’s wife mugged on her way home; someone’s daughter’s friend raped; someone else’s apartment burgled. Lead pollution in the air; the pale faces of children; the grey look of the elderly.

  Liffey’s words, once upon a time. Now Richard’s.

  Mabs and Tucker came over for a drink. Richard sat with his arm round Liffey, and Liffey, blooming in his new-found protection, wore a smock and looked really pregnant.

  “You are looking well,” said Mabs. “How’s the anaemia?”

  “Much better,” said Liffey.

  “Wonderful,” said Mabs. “It’s the elderberry wine’s done that.”

  Mabs gave Richard a bottle of nettle wine to take back to London.

  “Give some to your secretary,” said Mabs. “Perhaps it will sweeten her.”

  “Take more than drink to sweeten Miss Martin,” said Richard automatically.

  Richard kept his second appointment with the osteopath, and the back pain returned. He decided to spend the next weekend in London. Ray had gone off to Brussels on a free fish-tasting excursion for two, but taking Karen with him instead of Bella, who had a dentist’s appointment she couldn’t miss. Bella was left at home angry, which meant sexually extremely active: and Miss Martin’s Jeff was also away for the weekend, at an Encounter Therapy course, which meant that Miss Martin was free all Friday night, and her mother staying with relatives, so there was an empty house available for their love-making. Richard told Bella that he was with Liffey on Friday night, Miss Martin that he was with Liffey on Saturday night, and Liffey that he was at a weekend conference on permitted saline additives. Unfortunately, as often happened when he stayed away from home, his potency was unaccountably diminished, and both Miss Martin and Bella were disappointed. Moreover, Miss Martin had looked forward to making him a proper English breakfast, with bacon, eggs and sausages, and not the bread and jam and coffee with which Bella and Liffey apparently fobbed him off—but Richard only toyed with the plateful, and left the sausage altogether, and she felt he found her home rather ordinary and suburban. But of course he had hurt his back, and that clearly affected his enthusiasms —sexual, culinary and aesthetic.

  Richard blamed the osteopath.

  Trouble

  Mabs thought she might be pregnant. Her period was late. She felt heavy. She brought the children home iced lollies, and took Eddie to the dentist and let him sit on her knee in the waiting room.

  Then her period started.

  Storms clashed and banged around the Tor. Tucker laughed and Mabs’s eyes flashed. Mabs went out with her mother before dawn and gathered wild arum, cherry laurel and henbane in the grey light. Or rather, Mabs pointed and her mother picked; Mabs was bleeding and wasn’t supposed to touch. In any case, old women make better herbalists than young. Mabs’s mother chanted Hail Marys as she picked.

  “Do shut up, Mum,” complained Mabs. “That’s the wrong sort of mumbo-jumbo.”

  “It’ll do,” said Mabs’s mother. She didn’t look like a witch, any more than did her daughter. She had a round, lined face and open features and wore spectacles that swept up at the sides in the fashion of thirty years before. She was proud of her straight stature and good figure, wore tweed skirts and ironed blouses and went to Keep-Fit classes.

  “And what are you up to, anyway,” she asked of her daughter, “that the Blessed Virgin wouldn’t like?”

  Mabs smiled.

  “Just putting a few things right, Mum,” she said.

  “Because if you want to get pregnant,” said Mabs’s mum, “this is the best way I can think of, of making sure you’re not. And what do you want more children for? You don’t look after the one’s you’ve got, and you’re too old anyway. Now stop snivelling or I’m going straight home back to bed.”

  And indeed, Mabs stood up to her large knees in the long grass of the graveyard and snivelled because her mother was being unkind. She might have been anyone’s daughter.

  Mabs persuaded Audrey to do the distillation, and added a whole half-glassful to a bottle of the previous year’s elderberry wine, and gave it to Tucker to take over to Honeycomb Cottage. Liffey would not be the only one to drink it, but she was beyond caring.

  The six or seven drops of the distillation that Liffey swallowed did indeed lower her blood pressure, but without harming the baby. Her blood pressure, as the pregnancy advanced and the level of progesterone in her body diminished, was returning to normal. She no longer felt so faint or so disinclined to stand for long in one position as the circulation of blood through her various tissues proceeded more normally, although the blood vessels were not quite so relaxed as before. She was, in fact, beginning to feel well. Her complexion was smooth, her eyes glowed, her hair shone; she moved more lightly, she flung her arms around Richard; she bubbled and burbled and overflowed; she drank the glass of elderflower and felt obliging and friendly.

  “How was she?” Mabs asked Tucker on his return.

  “Looking better every day,” said Tucker.

  “Country air, country food, and country wine,” said Mabs.

  But he did not trust her.

  “Mind you be nice to her,” Tucker said. “She’s done you no harm.”

  Mabs was heating up hen food on the stove, and a musty smell filled the kitchen. The hens were off-lay again, and warm food for a day or two often started them off again. He came up behind her and ran his hands up her sides.

  “She’s pregnant and I’m not,” said Mabs, not looking at him. It was a confidence, and a question, and contained no threat.

  “It might be,” said Tucker cautiously, “that you’re your own worst enemy when it comes to that. Takes a soft and gentle woman to have a baby, not one full of hate.”

  She thought he might be right and resolved to try leaving Liffey’s baby alone for a while. Liffey was mid-pregnancy in any case, and the baby harder to shift now than at any time, and she could always return to the kill later on (if it did not work.)

  Time passed. Liffey had to use a safety pin to do up her skirt. She had gained twelve pounds. She had lost weight, as many women do, in the first three months of pregnancy, but the change in her diet from expensive protein foods to cheap carbohydrate bulk had more than compensated. The extra twelve pounds of course included the weight of the foetus, the placenta and the amniotic fluid, and the increase in the circulating blood. Liffey could expect through the course of the pregnancy to add about twenty-eight pounds to her normal weight. Now, at four and a half months, she had added eight pounds more than Dr. Southey thought proper, but on the other hand her colour was better, her face less strained, and the quiet life she led for five days of the week did her more good than the two weekend days with Richard could do her ill.

  Richard’s solicitor in the meanwhile wrote three more letters to Mory, which Mory did not even see, as Helen now destroyed all letters as they came through the letterbox. The kittens loved playing with paper shreds. Richard’s solicitor, moreover, was having domestic troubles, his files were in confusion, and migraine headaches sometimes kept him away from his office for weeks at a time. He was a friend of Richard’s father, had once known Richard’s mother well, and felt headaches coming on whenever he stretched out his hand to Richard’s file, thus considerably delaying Richard’s cause.

  “Everything’s under control,” he would say whenever Richard rang, or Miss Martin, asking for news. “These things can’t be hurried. Tenancy disputes always take time.”

  “Is that what we’re in?” Richard asked, troubled. “A tenancy dispute? I thought they were in illegal possession?”

  “I know what I’m doing, young man,” said Ric
hard’s solicitor merrily enough, but with a hint of asperity behind the merriment, putting Richard properly in his place. And when Liffey asked Richard if he trusted his solicitor, Richard replied, “I know what I’m doing, Liffey. Tenancy disputes always take time. And he’s an excellent solicitor. My father swears by him.” So that Liffey in her turn was put in her place.

  Mory’s application for a job in Argentina went unanswered.

  Miss Martin’s mother read an article aloud to her daughter over tea. Its title was “The Sticky Snare of the Married Man,” and Miss Martin was worried enough to say to Richard, “This can’t go on.”

  “What can’t go on?” he asked blankly, and she felt at once that she had been presumptuous, and fell into silence, and was more easily manipulated afterwards.

  She did suggest to Jeff, however, in desperation, that if he really wanted it, she would sleep with him before their marriage. But he said he wanted their married life to begin properly, and that he valued her purity very much, and explained what she had not known before, that his mother had been a “wild” woman and disgraced the family very much, and he was determined to have as a wife someone who would not repeat that sordid pattern. So she apologised, and felt even more guilty than before, and interpreted that emotion as a new flux of love for Richard.

  Mabs sat at the kitchen table and glowered. The room was cold, although outside the sun shone. The cows went off milk, the hens stopped laying again, one of the mangy dogs lay down at the end of his chain and died. Mabs dragged the body inside the house and wept with pity and frustration mixed. She laid it upon the kitchen table, considered it, rang up her mother to ask if she had any use for a dead dog, and her mother said no, but Carol might; and Carol sent Barry over in the van to fetch it back. Before he came Audrey stole a few of the coarse hairs from beneath its tail and taped it across Eddie’s ear, which had started discharging as a result of Mabs’s frequent cuffs.

  Mabs contemplated the nature of a world that could kill a dog she loved but keep Liffey’s baby, whom she hated, safe.

  Mabs decided that being good was no way to become happy, let alone pregnant.

  Visitors

  Madge came to visit Liffey. She thought it was expected of her. She came by taxi from the station and fretted at the extravagance. She thought the thatch was unhygienic and the rooms damp, but grudgingly admired the view. She said that Liffey should not be pregnant, in as much as she had no job, no training, and now no likelihood of getting one.

  “Richard will look after me,” said Liffey.

  “I’m sure I don’t know where you get it from,” said Madge sourly.

  “Get what?”

  “Naivety.”

  “It isn’t naivety. It’s trust and love.”

  “There’s always Social Security,” said Madge, “when the money runs out, which I suppose it will soon. Do you keep check?”

  “Of course,” lied Liffey.

  Madge conceded that Liffey looked well; she advised her not to eat fish, which contained a great deal of cadmium and other poisons, and asked her if she were not worried about fall-out from Hunkley Point, a nuclear power station some twenty miles distant.

  “I used to worry about that kind of thing,” said Liffey. “Not any more.”

  Mabs came round with damson wine, which Madge at first refused. Then she accepted, and sipped the deep red, sticky mixture.

  “It hasn’t fermented out yet,” said Madge firmly. “It has a bitter edge that will soften in time.”

  And she poured her glassful back into the bottle and did the same for Liffey’s.

  “I see you’re not drinking any yourself,” she said to Mabs.

  “Doctor’s orders,” said Mabs vaguely.

  “I think you’re very foolish to drink that stuff, Liffey,” said Madge when Mabs had gone. “Goodness knows what it does to the baby.”

  “I’m afraid you offended her,” said Liffey reproachfully. “She’s my only neighbour and I’m dependent on her, and she’s very proud of her home-made wine.”

  “I didn’t like her and I didn’t trust her,” said Madge. “I get girls like her at school sometimes. Wherever they are, there’s trouble. Heavy girls with good legs. They cheat at exams and steal from cloakrooms, and if they offer you chocolates, you can be sure they’re stale.”

  But Liffey took Madge’s advice in the wrong way and felt that her mother, far from trying to protect her, was attempting to upset and worry her. She did not wish to be told bad news, only to hear good news. It was a tendency apparent enough in normal times but emphasised now that she was pregnant. Disaffection made her bold.

  “Mother,” said Liffey, startling Madge. “Will you tell me who my father is?” It had been laid down between them long ago that Liffey did not enquire into the circumstance of her birth. Enough, Madge’s look had always said, that I had you, that I introduced you into the world, with considerable difficulty, and without any great pleasure to myself.

  “It’s only natural to want to know,” said Liffey into Madge’s silence.

  “It might be better for you not to,” said Madge, filling Liffey with instant fear that her father had been monstrous or deformed, or that she was the result of rape and that her child would inherit criminal tendencies. She had told Richard, for lack of any other way of accounting for herself, that her father had been a student friend of her mother’s who had died in an accident shortly after her, Liffey’s conception: and Richard had amended that part of it to “shortly after the wedding” for his parent’s ears.

  Lying, which had once seemed an essential part of Liffey’s life, the very base, indeed, on which it was founded—though a changing, shifting base, the consistency of an underfilled bean bag—now seemed inappropriate. The baby gave her courage, compounded the reality of her existence. She could not be wished away or willed away.

  “I want to know,” persisted Liffey, and heard the baby murmur its approval and leap in delight. She put her hand on her stomach. “The baby moved,” she said to her mother. “Moved for the first time.”

  “I expect it’s indigestion,” said Madge, but Liffey knew it wasn’t. The flutter came again.

  “He was an actor,” said Madge. “He assured me he was infertile. He’d had mumps when he was sixteen. When he made me pregnant he refused to believe it, thought I was trying to pull a fast one, and wouldn’t have anything to do with you or me. Mumps in men makes only a very small minority infertile of course—but you know what men are. They believe what they want to believe and expect you to do the same.”

  “What sort of actor was he?”

  “Shakespearean.”

  “Was he a good actor?”

  “He certainly thought so. I didn’t. He was the sweet-faced, curly-haired kind. Heterosexual, but who’d have thought it? He was very charming and very boring. You know what actors are.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  It seemed strange to Liffey to have found a father who was younger than she was.

  “You didn’t want to get rid of me?”

  “I did,” said Madge brusquely, “but it was illegal and expensive and dangerous, so I didn’t.”

  “Could I get in touch with him? If he didn’t want a child, he might want a grandchild.”

  “I doubt it very much,” said Madge. “He went to Canada to avoid a paternity suit.”

  Madge left on the Friday afternoon—missing Richard by a few hours.

  “Much as I’d love to see him,” she lied, “I have a pile of examination papers waiting. I must get back. And they may have forgotten to feed the cat.”

  Liffey knew that the minute she was out of sight she would be out of her mother’s mind: she realised that children do not forget mothers but that mothers forget children. That Madge had done her duty by her: had stalwartly taken the consequence of misfortune, had seen them through, and then put the whole thing from her mind—in the same way as, year after year, she would put a whole Upper Sixth out of mind, as it pas
sed from the school into adult life, and out of hers.

  Liffey waved her mother goodbye and knew that the parting was for ever. They would see each other again no doubt, but that small part of Madge that had been mother had been firmly swallowed up by the rest and ceased to be mother.

  Movement

  Eighteen weeks. The doctor laid a stethoscope to Liffey’s swelling abdomen, and she heard the beat of her baby’s heart —160 a minute.

  Liffey, listening, wore on her face an expression of satisfaction, gratification and calm.

  “What are you so pleased about?” asked the doctor. “Anyone would think it was your doing. All you have to do is just exist. The baby uses you to grow. You don’t grow it.”

  Liffey knew better. She hugged her baby in her heart. Ah, we: we have done it. We are doing it. It is all going to be all right. Listen to the heart: there it is, the pulsing of the Universe. It never stops. It is available to those who listen.

  “I felt the baby move,” she said.

  “Indigestion,” he said. “It’s too early.”

  Richard brought his washing home every weekend. Bella had told Helga not to do it any more.

  “Liffey has nothing better to do,” said Bella, “and you have, Helga.”

  Bella’s jealousy was spreading, ripples from the central pool of her feelings towards Karen. She did not mind Helga’s eyes so often upon Richard but objected to Richard’s upon Helga.

  “Women are so wonderful, so extraordinary,” Richard would keep saying. “All so different.”

  “We are half the human race,” snapped Bella, but he failed to get her point, and she ruthlessly sorted through the washing baskets and hauled out all Richard’s underpants and sweaters and vests and shirts and socks and jeans and shoved them in a pillowcase and sent them back to Liffey.