Liffey washed them lovingly, treated them with softener, dried them in the wind and sun, and ironed them and folded them; and presently Miss Martin, Bella and Helga were all to admire her handiwork. Miss Martin the whiteness of his shirt as he divested it, Bella the softness of a sock, and Helga the smoothness of vest.
Liffey looked in the mirror and was surprised. She was darker than she remembered. The increased pigmentation that accompanies pregnancy was more noticeable in her than it would have been in a fairer person. Freckles, moles, nipples all became darker; and the hair on her legs, usually so light as not to need removing, had become darker and more plentiful. Liffey noticed it with alarm as she took off Richard’s safety-pinned jeans and lay on the doctor’s couch, knees up, legs apart, at the twentieth week.
He put on a fine rubber glove to perform the examination, and did it, as before, with a cool professionalism that belied any notion that it might count as a sexual assault.
“Do you have to do this again?” Liffey asked the doctor, and he replied, “Yes, mid-term.” But offered no further information, and she did not ask. She had accepted his part in her pregnancy—the father’s part.
Ellen, the doctor’s receptionist, let slip to Mabs how well Liffey was doing. The next day Mabs brought Liffey round a tonic, made, she said, with honey and rosemary, but containing also dried mushroom powder, which she did not mention. Liffey took a tablespoon every morning.
Twenty weeks. The baby moved, there could be no doubt of it. A pattering, pittering feeling, like the movement of butterfly wings. Extraordinary. She walked all the way to Poldyke to tell Dr. Southey.
But listen, doctor, we have the whole world here inside!
Liffey told him too that her mouth felt oddly dry. That he could not explain, nor did he understand it. Her haemoglobin count was high, yet she complained of listlessness, and she was pale, and her eyes were dull. The doctor sent the health visitor up to visit Liffey. Mrs. Wild, a competent lady in her middle years, reported a quiet, clean, orderly household. No, there wasn’t much food in the cupboards, but, then, it was a long way from the shops. The husband worked away, but, then, so do many in rural districts. He came home at the weekends. Most weekends. The garden was beautifully tended. No phone, but neighbours were close at hand. Nothing to worry about.
The doctor worried about her all the same. He would have asked her over to supper at home, but Liffey had no transport, and he could not find time to collect and deliver her himself, and his wife could not drive. Besides, where would it end? The world was full of listless young women. He did not have the strength to give them all the kiss of life. Nevertheless he did what he could for her. He persisted: he asked Mrs. Wild who the neighbours were.
“Tucker and Mabs Pierce,” said Mrs. Wild.
“Eddie’s mother?”
“Eddie’s just accident prone,” said Mrs. Wild defensively.
He did not comment. He studied Liffey’s card.
“I know what it is,” he said, laughing. “She’s overlooked. Mabs Pierce is one of the Tree sisters.”
Tales of old Mrs. Tree filtered through to the surgery. She was reputed to have dosed her husband to death with a cure for rheumatism, to have made horses limp and hens go off-lay. A woman whose son had jilted Carol had lost her hand in a food press the day after news got out—crushed to a pulp, and injuries by crushing were, as everyone knew, witches’ doing.
“Because the mother’s a witch doesn’t make the daughter one too,” said Mrs. Wild, who had been born in Poldyke, although trained elsewhere.
“I hope you don’t believe in witches,” said the doctor, surprised.
“Of course not,” she said, saving herself.
“Just as well,” he said, “or they might have power over you. Those who don’t believe in them can’t be harmed by them, and Liffey Lee-Fox is not the kind to believe in witches. So let’s rule out overlooking and find another reason why someone with a high haemoglobin count—up in the mid-eighties—should be pallid and listless.”
“Marital troubles,” said Mrs. Wild.
“Quite so,” said Dr. Southey.
He asked Liffey to come to the surgery every week instead of every two weeks: the two-week arrangement was a measure of vague unease about her, the one-week of something nearing anxiety. A visit a month is the normal arrangement in midpregnancy.
“He must be worried!” said Mabs when Liffey told her. “And you’re not looking very well. I hope you’re taking your tonic?”
“Oh yes,” said Liffey.
“Well, make sure you do. It’s honey and rosemary. Best thing in the world if you’re poorly.”
“It certainly tastes delicious,” said Liffey, and it did.
Tucker noticed the change in Liffey. He was angry with Mabs. He defied her.
“You stop doing whatever you’re doing to her,” he said. “Just stop doing it. What’s bad for one is bad for all.”
“She’s taken what’s mine,” said Mabs.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “There’s always more than enough to go round.”
“But there isn’t,” said Mabs. “How can there be? If one has it, another one hasn’t.”
It was a deep doctrinal point, a profound rift. Tucker had a vision of continual creation, streaming outward: Mabs of a fixed-state Universe, of strictly limited riches. Her children felt it, dividing up the fixed and miserly amount of her love, and starving.
“Anyway,” said Mabs, “what makes you think it’s me who’s harming her? More like the doctor’s poisoning her with his iron pills. I know of a child who died, taking them out of his mother’s bag and thinking they were sweets. If they’ll kill a child, they can’t be good for the mother. Someone should tell her.”
Tucker took Mabs, all dressed up, to the Farmers’ Ball. She wore real sapphires and a green silk dress, and they went in the new Rover they kept in the barn for special occasions. They had bought it with the help of a government grant for the purchase of farm machinery. He wore a suit and a tie. Dressed up, they looked quite ordinary, almost negligible. But they were pleased with themselves and took the Rover down the track to show themselves off to Liffey.
Liffey looked pathetic and wan, standing on the path outside Honeycomb Cottage, waving. The garden, beyond Liffey’s energy now to control, was overgrown and tangled, and the evening light sombre. Liffey herself was too fat in parts and too thin in others. Mabs, secure in green silk, thought she could afford to be kind.
Tucker put it to her another way.
“If you want to get pregnant,” he said, “you’ll have to do as I say. A man has to be boss in his own house. Look around you.”
And looking round, Mabs saw the force of his argument, saw, as he did, a natural order in the world about her, of male dominance and female receptivity: saw the behaviour of hens around the cockerel, the cow submissive before the bull, the bitch accepting the dog, the little female cats yowling for the tom.
Mabs even contemplated leaving the mushroom powder out of Liffey’s tonic, but she talked the matter over with Carol, who snorted and said, “What are you talking about, Mabs? People aren’t animals. Tucker talks like that because it suits him, not because it’s true.”
Richard said to Bella, “Liffey’s looking awfully ill.”
Bella said, “I don’t want to hear about your wife, Richard.”
Richard rang up Mr. Collins, his solicitor, in the hope that there would be news of the apartment and the routing of Mory and Helen, but only an answering machine replied, taking a message and promising a return call. No return call was made.
“You don’t really want your wife to come back to London,” said Miss Martin sadly. “You’re having the best of both worlds, the way things are.” That was, according to her mother’s magazines, the way men were, and she believed them.
And even while Richard worried for Liffey, Richard knew that what Miss Martin said was true. His duty lay towards Liffey, but no longer his inclination. And what was a man
to do about that?
Liffey, on her next visit to the surgery, accepted a lift in Mabs’s car. She did not think she had the strength to walk. The rutted path was baked in the sun, and the car jolted and jerked fiercely.
Dr. Southey looked quite shocked when she came into his surgery.
“You’re taking your vitamin supplement?”
“Yes. And Mabs next door makes me up a tonic.”
“What’s in it?”
“Only honey and rosemary. I take it every morning.”
“Then don’t,” he said, and added on impulse, “You’re not still being sick?”
“Yes, quite a lot. Isn’t that normal? You said not to worry about it, just to put up with it.”
“For God’s sake, woman,” he shouted, “where’s your common sense?”
Where indeed? Out the window, along with independent judgment. The pregnant woman leans upon her advisor, no longer thinks for herself. He had heard it often enough at the ante-natal clinic. “I feel like a cabbage, I look like a cow.” Large-bellied women sitting in their stolid rows, legs apart for comfort’s sake.
Liffey looked quite startled.
“I meant not to worry for the first three months,” he said more gently, relieved to have discovered the cause of her trouble. He prescribed some tablets, and Liffey fetched them from the chemist—as Mabs discovered from her friend the girl in the dispensary, but too late to do any switching—but in fact did not take them, memories of thalidomide in her mind. But she did stop taking Mabs’s tonic and instantly felt better and stopped vomiting. But she did not make a connection between the two events.
Dr. Southey assumed that the cessation of vomiting was due to the anti-histamine drug he had prescribed.
Mabs watched Liffey grow plump and bloom again. She burned the bottoms of saucepans out and slammed doors and hit Eddie and shook her fist at the sky, which provided a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder but little more.
Glastonbury Tor looked black from a distance, like a coconut cake covered by flies. It swarmed with tourists and hippies and little knots of people trying to focus cosmic energies down from the skies with one device or another. It was a shoddy place this time of year, Mabs felt, its powers divided amongst too many purposeless people, covered with litter. She felt displaced. Liffey, on the other hand, felt merry and bright and companionable and more like other people. Ramblers came past the door, and mushroom hunters, and Mrs. Wild called again, and Audrey would come up and talk, and sometimes Eddie would just come and stand and stare.
“I hope you’re taking your tonic,” Mabs said to Liffey.
“Oh yes,” lied Liffey, to save embarrassment and trouble.
So she had lied to her mother when asked if she had brushed her teeth or done her homework. She had not quite given up lying, for it is a hard habit to break. It was to her advantage, now as then: she lied convincingly, and Mabs believed her, as had Madge before her.
Inside Liffey (9)
The baby was unharmed by the general depletion of Liffey’s energies. The placenta took priority over the normal demands of Liffey’s system. Liffey, as she vomited, suffered from lack of calcium, vitamins, proteins, fats and carbohydrates— but the baby did not. Liffey’s fat deposits were broken down, as necessary, to provide what was needed.
Liffey was now seven months’ pregnant. Her heart was enlarged. Its workload had increased by some 40 per cent, it beat at a rate of 70 a minute—9 more than was its custom before she was pregnant. Her heart was, little by little, pushed further up her chest by her enlarging uterus. All this was normal, if extraordinary and uncomfortable. Liffey’s lungs too were working at considerable disadvantage, being pushed into a smaller and smaller area within her chest: her ribs were having to spread sidewise to accommodate them. She took large breaths from time to time: she was comfortable only on high chairs, sitting straight. If she slumped, she felt she could hardly breathe at all. She started piling up the pillows behind her at night. Just as well, perhaps, that Richard was with her now only on Saturday nights. He pleaded pressure of work on Friday evenings, and on Saturday took the early-morning train to the country, and the one back to London on Sunday night. The local station was open again now, and had been for some months, but the notion of Richard being a daily commuter had long been abandoned.
He made love to Liffey reverentially, and she wished he would not. She had developed, through her pregnancy, a marked interest in sexual matters, and a desire for sexual experiment, and an almost seedy interest in pornography, as if her body was anxious to keep her in practice and her genitals lubricated. She did not understand it, and did not like it, finding herself searching through drawers for the sex magazines Mabs used to wrap her offerings of this and that, and which she had meant to burn but never got round to. She told no one, feeling ashamed. And as Richard seemed shocked if she wanted to change her position from that gentle one of nesting spoons, which was the most sedate her pregnant shape would allow, Richard felt uneasy and embarrassed. Sex with Liffey, for Richard, was an expression of affection and a mark of dedication, not of need fulfilled, or passion gratified, or desires sated.
Liffey suffered now from vague aches and pains. Her ligaments, in particular those in her pelvis, became softer and liable to overstretch. A group of moles on her forearm enlarged. The hair on her legs was so dark and so obvious that she took to shaving her legs with Richard’s razor. Her skin became rather dry, and she itched and scratched a good deal. The veins in her legs, now slightly varicose, irritated her. Her vulva did too, for the same reason. She developed thrush and painful little ulcers as a result, but they responded at once to fungicidal pessaries prescribed by the doctor.
“Thrush!” she cried in horror. “But I’m so careful to be clean.”
He explained that the thrush fungus flies through the air and that there is nothing it likes more than a warm, moist, pregnant vagina. Liffey, he said, was lucky not to have developed piles, or they would be irritating too.
In the city the streets baked, drivers and pedestrians alike were bad-tempered, dog turds withered where they lay, sightseeing buses held up the traffic, exhaust fumes hung about the unhurried air, and were breathed in by the foreign visitors, who sat outside cafes at makeshift tables, holding up the city’s flow of business.
Mory and Helen kept the windows wide open. The electricity supply had been cut off, so there was no refrigerator and the butter melted before it could reach the bread: they had no money for the launderette—or rather, none they were prepared to -waste on it—and dirty clothes lay in heaps upon the floors. Helen would not wash by hand, and Mory could not. They seldom left the apartment together, fearing that if they did, someone would nip in when they were away and bar the door against their re-entry. For these misfortunes they blamed Liffey.
On one of these hot days Helen recognised the writing on an envelope, and saw that it was addressed to her, and refrained from destroying it and opened it. It was from her younger sister Lally, accusing her of murdering Lally’s baby.
You always hated me [wrote Lally] because I was so much prettier and brighter than you, and could walk and talk before you although I was ten months younger. And then you married Mory and thought you were one up because you were married before me, but then I got pregnant without even bothering to marry, so you had to have your revenge. I know all this because I am in treatment with a wonderful man who has explained it all to me.
Helen screamed and cried and grew purple, and Mory thought she would choke.
“We can’t live like this,” he moaned. “What’s gone wrong with our lives?”
Helen took a whole lot of sleepers and when she woke said, “It’s this place. Everything’s gone wrong since we came here. We’ve got to get out.”
“How?” asked Mory.
“Write to Richard,” said Helen, “and say we’ll get out if he gives us a thousand pounds to find somewhere else. Then we can have a holiday, get to the sun and out of this dump.”
Richard r
eceived the demand and telephoned his solicitor, who was not there.
“You can’t respond to threat and blackmail,” said Miss Martin righteously.
“You haven’t got a thousand pounds,” Bella sneered.
“Your wife would suffer if you moved her now,” Helga pointed out. On those rare evenings when both Bella and Ray were out together Richard now joined Helga in her little attic room. He had been right about the exacting nature of her sexuality: he interpreted her neglect of his washing as a reproof, concluding that he failed her in some way. Indeed, he was so nervous of discovery by Bella as to be unduly hasty in his performance with Helga.
Richard thought that Miss Martin, Bella and Helga judged the situation rightly and said nothing to Liffey about Mory’s offer. Pregnant women, he knew, should be spared undue worry. He had looked through the letterbox, in any case, on one or two occasions and had seen the filth within, and wished Liffey to be spared the sight.
Richard felt inadequate in his dealings with Mory and Helen. He had been emasculated by the law; his instinct was to break down the door and snap Mory’s neck and throw Helen down the stairs and regain both his territory and his pride, but these things were illegal and uncivilised. Nor could he find the courage to hurt his family’s feelings by changing his solicitor. Frustrated in his masculinity in these respects, he felt obliged to reassert it by taking Miss Martin, Bella and Helga to bed. And inasmuch as it was Liffey’s doing that Mory and Helen featured in his life at all, accounted her responsible for its general current unquietness.
He found his weekends at home increasingly unsatisfactory. Liffey was not so active about the house as she had been. There were dead spiders in his toothmug, and she put food on the table in saucepans instead of dishing up properly. And there were no napkins. He had become accustomed to napkins in the restaurants he frequented. But in his heart he knew that the trouble lay not in Liffey but in his own guilt. He would find fault with her in order to justify his conduct, and the worse his conduct was the more he would diminish her. Liffey fails me in this respect and that, therefore it is only reasonable for me to find consolation elsewhere.
Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 Page 18