Weldon, Fay - Novel 07

by Puffball (v1. 1)

  He could not look her in the eye. He would rather be in London, compounding his offences, than face her trust.

  Ray made matters worse by confiding in him.

  “What am I going to do about Bella,” asked Ray, “now that 1 have Karen? It isn’t just the infatuation of a middle-aged man for a young girl—it is more like an appointment made by destiny. Of course I’ll wait. She’s only sixteen. 1 shan’t sleep with her until she’s nineteen. It wouldn’t be right. And then of course we’ll be married. But that’s three years pretending to feel husbandly towards Bella when I’m waiting to marry someone else.”

  “So long,” said Richard cautiously, “as Karen feels the same in three years’ time.”

  “Karen’s one of nature’s innocents,” said Ray with confidence. “I wouldn’t dream of presenting her with my feelings —she would be shocked and alarmed. But I just catch her looking at me sometimes—those pure green almond eyes beneath the long red hair—and I know, and she knows, and she’ll wait for me—”

  “Of course Bella might find someone else.”

  Ray looked startled.

  “I hardly think so,” he said. “She’s far too long in the tooth for that. Besides, I trust her implicitly. It’s just one of nature’s cruel tricks—to keep a man attractive long after a woman is past it.”

  “Quite so,” said Richard.

  Complications

  In the thirtieth week of Liffey’s pregnancy Mabs went out into the night with a dead candle, and melted it down, and moulded the soft wax into an image of Liffey, stomach bulging, and drove a pin through its middle. An owl flew out of a hedge just as she struck, hooting and flapping, and quite scared her.

  When she went back into the house to put the image into the drawer Audrey was groaning at the kitchen table, complaining of stomach pains, quite taking Mabs aback. She took the pin out, and in the morning Audrey’s pains were gone. Mabs asked her mother to stick the pin for her.

  “I’m not sticking no pins in any poor girl’s stomach,” said Mrs. Tree crossly, ‘just because you want to breed a football team. Why don’t you look after the ones you’ve got? Something terrible will happen if you go on like this, and it won’t happen to her, it will happen to one of yours, and serve you right.”

  So the image lay in Mabs’s drawer, without a pin but with a hole through its middle all the same.

  Next time Liffey went to see Dr. Southey and lay on her back on his couch while he felt, with firm, chilly fingers, the outline of the baby, she noticed a flicker of surprise on his face. She always watched his expression carefully as she lay, thinking she might find out more from that than from his words.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked sharply.

  “Nothing,” he said, “but I think we might send you up for a scan.”

  “What’s a scan?”

  “A sonic picture.”

  “Is it bad for the baby?”

  “No.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you want me to have one?” She snapped the question out, first thing first.

  “The baby seems rather high, that’s all.”

  “Too high for what?”

  “It might be nothing. It might be placenta praevia.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The placenta is attached below the baby, not beside it or above it.”

  “Is that dangerous?”

  “If there weren’t doctors and hospitals in the world, it might be. But as there are, it isn’t. You can go in for the scan by ambulance tomorrow.”

  “Ambulance? Am I delicate?”

  “No. It’s simpler and more comfortable and I'll be sure you’ve gone. Your husband might like to come too. It's nice to see a picture of the baby, after all.”

  Liffey rang Richard from the surgery. Miss Martin answered the telephone.

  “I’m afraid he’s at a meeting, Mrs. Lee-Fox. Is it important?”

  “No.” ,

  “I can take a message if you like.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Sad, thought Liffey, putting down the phone, that nasty things are thought important, but nice things aren’t. News of death travels faster than news of triumph. Miss Martin did not tell Richard that Liffey had rung. He was not in fact at a meeting but chatting with a colleague down the corridor. She did not think Richard would go home that weekend, and if any question of the phone-call arose, the passage of time would have clouded the issue by the time he saw Liffey again.

  Liffey went by ambulance to the hospital, and marvelled at how smooth the ride was, compared to what it was like when she drove with Mabs. She sat behind two white-coated ambulance men, who were friendly, and wondered at her courage, living all alone miles from civilisation, nearing her time, and without a telephone. Liffey, hearing it put like that, felt, for the first time, almost sorry for herself.

  “I have friends and neighbours,” she said. “The Pierces.”

  “Mabs Pierce? Old Mrs. Tree’s daughter?” said one. “Well, as long as she’s a friend and not an enemy.”

  “Why do you say that?” Liffey asked, but neither man would answer directly.

  Liffey lay on a slab, with her stomach oiled, and a technician moved a scanner back and forth, back and forth over the mound of the baby, building up a picture on a screen, as a child makes the pattern of a coin on tissue paper, shading the circle with pencil. There was the curve of the baby’s backbone, the little hunched head. Liffey felt both reassured and shocked at what seemed an untimely manifestation of spirit into flesh. The technicians pointed and murmured. Beneath the baby’s head, banning its exit to the world, was the shadowy boat-shape of the placenta.

  Mabs felt her spirits rise. She dressed up and went into town and had coffee with Carol, and had her hair done, and looked at her face in the hairdresser’s mirror and saw again the face of a young girl, Tucker’s bride, happy to have left her mother’s cottage and become mistress of Cadbury Farm, pregnant and fruitful, in the days before she knew the depths of her own malice and anger and greed. That’s what I was, thought Mabs; that’s what I still could be—happy and simple and good. What happens to all of us, with time? But when she got home, all the same, she stuck a pin into Liffey. Tucker’s baby was not to live in Liffey: she had every right to stop it. Debbie complained of a pain, but Mabs took no notice. Liffey came to Mabs in tears.

  “They think I’ll have to have a Caesarian,” she said.

  “That’s bad,” said Mabs. “Why?”

  “Otherwise when labour starts I’ll just bleed to death, and the baby will suffocate.”

  “They always exaggerate,” said Mabs. “Dr. Southey loves to frighten women. He’s famous for it. Have some tea? Or a glass of wine to cheer you up? I’ve got some of last year’s plum.”

  “I’ll have some tea.”

  Mabs made some rosemary tea and sweetened it with honey and put in a pinch of dried mushroom powder.

  “Placenta praevia,” marvelled Mabs. “Dr. Southey said I had one of those with Eddie. But it moved over by itself: they always do. I had a perfectly normal labour.”

  “And I’m so far from the hospital—supposing I don’t get there in time.”

  “We’ll look after you,” said Mabs. “Come to that, we could always deliver you ourselves. Think of all the cows Tucker and I have done.”

  It was meant to be a joke, and Liffey tried to smile.

  Mabs rang Richard on Liffey’s behalf, since she seemed the only one able to get past Miss Martin, and told him that Liffey was upset and why, that the doctor was just being an alarmist, and that Liffey looked all right to her, and Caesarian, in any case, was perfectly routine. Liffey listened.

  “I expect she’s got it all wrong anyway,” said Richard. “You know what Liffey’s like.”

  Liffey went off to be sick, and attributed it to nerves, not to Mabs’s tea. After all, Mabs had drunk it too. But it was the sort of thing she noticed these days. When she got back Mabs had put down the
phone.

  “He had to take a transatlantic call,” said Mabs. “But he sent you his love. He said Tina and Tony had got German measles. I don’t think he ought to come down until he’s out of quarantine, do you? If you get it, the baby can be born blind and dumb.”

  “I thought that was only in the first three months.”

  “That’s what they say, but I had a friend had it at six months and her baby was a Mongol.”

  Richard did not come back at the weekend, at Liffey’s request. Tina and Tony coughed and groaned and sweated, out of sight and out of their parents’ minds.

  Richard had become suddenly afraid that the baby would be born deformed, that out of the once beloved, wholesome Liffey a monster would emerge.

  “That’s guilt speaking,” said Bella. “You believe you’re so bad you can’t produce anything good.”

  “I expect it’s true,” he said, and wept.

  “Christ,” said Bella, “don’t I have enough with Ray, without you starting as well?”

  Bella curled her legs around the small of his back and they rocked and rocked, and Richard’s tears passed.

  “You’ll feel better when the baby’s born,” Bella assured him. “When I was pregnant with Tony, Ray went on a gastronomic tour of New Zealand; and with Tina, it was Tierra del Fuego. At least you’ve kept within telephonic distance.”

  “I don’t like the thought of Liffey being cut open,” said Richard.

  “Saves you having to do your paternal duty and watch,” said Bella. “I’m sure it’s unnecessary anyway. Doctors just make more money out of the National Health doing operations than leaving things to nature.”

  Liffey was frightened. The baby was silent. She felt that the scan had been in some way an insult to him: she’d been checking up on him. Giving him physical shape before he was ready.

  The weather grew colder. It rained and rained, and slugs got the poor, sodden strawberries. Four cows broke through from Tucker’s side of the stream, breaking down the fence, splashing through the water, trampling and munching her patch of vegetables. She asked Tucker to move them, and he didn’t, and she had been afraid to persist, for his kind and friendly eyes, as she asked, had taken on a speculative look, and he had laid his hand on her stomach in the half-pleased, half-envious way people did sometimes, but that was somehow something different in Tucker, reminding her of what she would rather not remember. So there the cows stayed, staring and munching and splattering round her back door, and Richard not coming back for seventeen days, which was the incubation period for German measles, and a pain in her stomach every now and then, as if someone had pierced her through the middle with a laser beam, but which Dr. Southey told her was nothing.

  As if a placenta praevia was not enough.

  In-Laws

  Richard’s parents came down to stay as soon as Richard was out of quarantine. Liffey made the house as pleasant and pretty as a shortage of money and energy would allow. She dusted out cobwebs, and turned sheets side to middle, and noticed how quick the processes of dilapidation and depression were—when cracked cups were kept because there was no money to replace them, and burned saucepans scraped, not thrown away, and stained carpets merely scrubbed, and damp wallpaper patched. The houses of the poor take longer to clean than the houses of the rich—rooms must be tidied and polished before guests appear; a wealthy disorder is tolerable, the jumble of desolation is not.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Fox were shocked by the change in Liffey’s appearance, but felt she was wholly to blame. She was letting herself go: she would depress Richard. She was young and healthy and had nothing else to do all day but look after herself —why was she not doing it properly? Mrs. Lee-Fox told Liffey how well she was looking and remarked on how pregnancy evidently suited her, and looked forward to at least another six grandchildren.

  Mr. Lee-Fox went further into the matter of Mory and Helen’s occupancy of the London apartment.

  “Of course it was a gift to you and Richard freely given,” he said, “but we hardly expected it to be given away so soon!” He appeared to be joking—he smilecLand smiled as he spoke. “All the same,” he added, “Collins is a fine solicitor; he’ll get them out of there in no time. Of course the law of the land these days is on the side of thieves and vagrants.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Fox liked their cups to rest on saucers and their saucers on tablecloths and their tablecloths on polished tables, and Liffey did what she could to oblige. Her own daintiness seemed a thing of the past, her swelling belly on too large a scale to allow for a retreat into little, pretty, feminine ways.

  When Richard arrived, having been delayed, or so he said, by queues of traffic leaving London, his car was laden with the exotic foods that once had been their staple diet. His parents marvelled.

  “How well he looks after you, Liffey!”

  “Worth waiting for, after all, Liffey.”

  “All the goodies of the world on your doorstep, Liffey!” “Why live near to the shops with a delivery service like this!” “Isn’t Richard a wonder! Where does he find the energy. Not to speak of the time. Makes the money, does the shopping, drives a hundred miles for a kiss, and comes up smiling!” “Whose friends were they, Liffey, this Helen and Mory? Yours or Richard’s?”

  “Mine,” said Liffey.

  Richard was kind, charming and hard-working all weekend. He was up early to make the breakfast, bring tea in bed for Liffey; then he fetched the papers, weeded the garden, mended the banister, peeled the potatoes, and washed up.

  “Good heavens, Liffey, it isn’t a husband you’ve got here, it’s a servant.”

  That night Liffey placed Richard’s hand on her stomach, but he withdrew it as soon as he tactfully could. Being in his parents presence had focused the matter for him forcibly. He did not want to be a father. He did not want to join the grown-ups. He wanted to be a boy-husband and have a girl-bride. Liffey was making him old beyond his years.

  On Sunday afternoon, while Richard was out walking with his father, Mrs. Lee-Fox enquired further into Liffey’s side of the family.

  “Of course I met your mother at the wedding. What a brave and independent lady! I only wish I could have been like her and flouted convention. But I never had the courage. What was your father like, Liffey?”

  “Slippery, from the sound of him,” said Liffey. “Apart from that, I don’t know.”

  “But your mother is a widow.”

  “No,” said Liffey. “Unmarried and deserted.”

  Mrs. Lee-Fox’s hand trembled as she sipped Mabs’s homemade plum wine. The wine contained a distillation of the seed of a flower known locally as Tell-the-Truth, and had been given to Liffey and Richard by Mabs on the grounds that, one way or another it was bound to cause trouble.

  “I’m glad you told me the truth, Liffey,” said Mrs. Lee-Fox. She wore many rings on her once pretty fingers and a thick gold charm bracelet on a still slender wrist. Her hair was grey and curled, and sad eyes battled for predominance over a mouth composed into an enduring smile.

  “Thank you for telling me your secret, Liffey,” said Mrs. Lee-Fox, sipping plum wine.

  “I shall now tell you my secret,” added Mrs. Lee-Fox. “It’s bigger than yours and I’ve kept it longer.”

  “I’ve never really loved Richard,” said Mrs. Lee-Fox, her head spinning from Tell-the-Truth, “because, you see, Richard isn’t his father’s child.”

  “He has his father’s nose and his father’s neck,” confided Mrs. Lee-Fox, “and his father is Mr. Collins, the solicitor, who treated me very badly. Talk about being seduced and abandoned!”

  “No use looking shocked, Liffey,” reproved Mrs. Lee-Fox, “because all women are sisters under the skin, and if this child of yours is Richard’s, I’ll eat my hat. If it was his he’d be here all the time. He’s acting completely out of character, all this sweet talk and washing up; you’re both of you putting on an act, and I .know what it is. You’ve cheated on him, Liffey, and he’s agreed to stand by you.”

&nbs
p; “No,” cried Liffey, on her feet. “No!”

  “Another secret,” said Mrs. Lee-Fox calmly, “is that Mr. Collins is an extremely bad solicitor, but I can hardly tell my husband that in the circumstances, let alone my son.”

  “I did my best to raise Richard properly,” wept Mrs. Lee-Fox into her glass, “but he always reminded me of what I’d rather forget. And Liffey, Mr. Collins had a grandmother who was an Asiatic. I remember him telling me so. If the baby has slant- eyes, Liffey, for my sake say it comes from your father’s side. I have lived in fear of this for so long. It has clouded my whole life.”

  Liffey put her mother-in-law to bed with a hot-water bottle. When the older woman woke she seemed perfectly normal and the smile was back, and she and her husband departed with little conventional cries of pleasure and admiration and apparent ordinariness.

  Inside and Outside

  Thirty-four weeks.

  “Still a placenta praevia,” said the doctor to Liffey. “But never mind. We’ll take care of you. And the baby will be saved the struggle of getting out, won’t he?”

  Ah, but what about me, doctor? What about my tight and stretching tummy? Where are you going to take your knife and slit it? From top to bottom or side to side?

  “You’ll have to see the specialist,” said the doctor. “I’ll send you to see him this week.”

  The hospital was large and new, hot and carpeted. Pregnant ladies walked bright corridors up and down, up and down, dressing gowns stretched to cover swollen tummies. Young men waited at telephones, faces elated or anxious or bored.

  “We’ll give you a bikini scar,” said the specialist. “Just below the line of your pubic hair. Almost unnoticeable. That’s if all goes well, of course. If we’re in a hurry we do the best we can, for you and baby, and without a doubt that old-fashioned navel-to-pubis cut is quicker and safer. But there you are—you girls think of your figure more than your baby.”