Liffey didn’t like the specialist. Nor did he particularly like women.
“We’ll keep the baby inside you as long as we possibly can. If you start to bleed, which you probably will soon, because the placenta’s likely to tear when it’s down there, and then the blood starts, and you’ll go on bleeding until the baby’s out. So when I say to come in quickly if you see so much as a spot of blood, that’s what I mean. A placenta praevia is rare in a first pregnancy. You sure you haven’t been pregnant before?
“Quite sure.”
“You’re not hiding anything?”
She began to think perhaps she was, such was the force of his suspicion, his determination that all women were fools and knaves and the enemies of their babies. She tried to think, but could not, to give her past a reality acceptable to him. Yes, I have had measles and mumps—but a baby? Did I? Her silence irritated him.
“Well, let’s say you’re just unlucky.”
Liffey thought, all of a sudden: Mabs did this to me. If she was unlucky it was because Mabs had done it to her. She had never been unlucky before. The baby danced and laughed to confirm her conclusion. Mabs was not a friend, she was an enemy.
“Active little beggar,” said the specialist. His hands, she acknowledged, however much she disliked them, were experienced and competent. “You’re lucky to have kept him inside this long. You’re sure there’s been no bleeding?”
“No.”
“No, you’re not sure, or no, there’s been no bleeding?”
Ah, he was a bully.
Never mind, sang the baby, never mind. I’ll be all right. So will you. Liffey felt she had to protect such charming naivety.
“No bleeding.” There will be no bleeding either until my baby is forty weeks old, give or take a day or two. My baby’s no fool. Nor am I. I’ll keep him in and he’ll cooperate.
“He isn’t the most tactful of men,” said the doctor tentatively, of the specialist. “But on the other hand, he won’t let you die.”
Liffey was elated. She felt that things were better now between herself and Richard. She felt sure the baby would nudge the placenta praevia over when it felt like it. She did not believe her mother-in-law’s account of her husband’s birth. She would keep out of Mabs’s way and things would go better.
Thirty-four weeks. Oh, she was heavy, breathless, and languid, but she was still happy. Richard had, for some reason, turned vegetarian, so she worried in case she was not eating enough meat for the baby’s welfare. Richard assured her that animal flesh did more harm to the human body than good. He wore a lovely pair of thonged sandals. They had a good weekend. He took her to the pub, which she liked but knew he hated. He had enough of people during the week. So he said.
Richard had lately met up with a girl called Vanessa. She had auditioned for a part in a television commercial for oxtail soup, and failed to get it, but had given Richard her telephone number. She was an actress, had a degree from Oxford, a flat and slender crotch across which jeans strained, a mother who was a countess, and her own apartment. Richard thought she was just about right for him. She was a vegetarian and thought that sex was yucky and pushed off roving hands, but Richard thought she would soon be cured of that. She was twenty-one.
He was particularly animated and cheerful that weekend. He told Liffey about Ray’s love for Karen and how it upset Bella.
“So long as she doesn’t expect you to comfort her,” said Liffey.
Richard shuddered at the thought.
“Bella,” he said, “is a withered bag who talks too much. I’m sorry for her, and she’s good to me, but I could no more—oh, really, Liffey!”
“What about Helga?” Sometimes Liffey wondered about Helga.
“Helga is a hausfrau, and I don’t go for hausfraus. You’ll be laying the finger on poor Miss Martin next.”
“You did go off with your secretary last Christmas.”
“Go off with? You mean she fell on top of me at a drunken party, and if you hadn’t been spying you’d never even have known.”
“I wasn’t spying.”
But he was angry, and made her drink up and took her home.
He relented as they passed Cadbury Farm and kissed her proffered cheek. Her skin these days was hot to the touch, as if fires burned inside her.
“I think Mabs is a witch,” said Liffey as they passed the farm.
“That’s a very unkind thing to say about a neighbour,” said Richard.
“If you nailed her footprint to the ground,” said Liffey, “I bet she’d limp. That’s how you can tell a witch.”
The next day, giggling and absurd, as in the old days, they crept down the lane when Mabs and Tucker were out, and found a footprint made by Mabs in the marshy ground where she went to feed her ducks, and hammer, hammer, Richard drove a nail right into it.
Then they watched and waited for Mabs to come back, and sure enough, when she did, she was limping. They laughed and laughed, and went up later to the farm and asked what was the matter with Mabs’s foot, and Mabs replied she’d stubbed her big toe and all but broken it, hadn’t she, Tucker? And Tucker said yes, she’d walked straight into a tree stump, what’s the matter with you two? For they were stifling giggles, but of course they couldn’t say—ah, like the old times back again. Happy days. That night they lay curled like spoons together, and Richard stayed until Monday morning and kissed Liffey goodbye as if he meant it and didn’t want to go. And he didn’t.
Honeycomb Cottage, as he looked back at it from the car, nestled amidst hollyhocks and roses like a childhood dream of the future. This was surely what he wanted and enough for any man.
And Liffey, waving goodbye, sensed it, and hoped yet to achieve what her mother had not—an ordinary marriage, and ordinary family, and ordinary happiness.
But the next day she had a nasty pain in her sacroiliac joint, at the top of her buttocks, three inches to the right of midpoint, and could hardly walk.
Mabs came over by chance with some honey, and sent Tucker over to drive her at once to the doctor’s surgery. Liffey was in such pain she almost forgot her dislike of the Pierce’s car.
“Was that Tucker Pierce?” asked the doctor, manipulating the joint.
“Yes.”
“He’s changed,” said the doctor. “It’s not in his nature to do good turns. Not in anyone’s round here, come to that.”
He’d just sent the ambulance for the body of a recluse, found badly decayed in the caravan he’d inhabited for fifteen years.
“His wife makes him,” said Liffey. She’d forgotten all the nonsense about Mabs being a witch; all, all had been washed away in loving laughter and trust of Richard.
Liffey’s back creaked and cracked as the doctor pressed and dug, and the pain went, although the joint remained a little tender.
“Well,” said Tucker, “here we are, just you and me. Time we had a little talk.”
“What about, Tucker?”
“Don’t get all la-di-dah with me. That’s my baby you’ve got in there and don’t you forget it.”
“Tucker!” she was horrified. “You can’t think that. It couldn’t possibly be yours.”
“Mabs thinks it is. According to her sister’s friend who works up at the doctor’s, it’s as like as not my baby.”
“You mean Mabs knows?”
“Of course she knows. She’s my wife. We have no secrets.”
“You told her?”
“Of course.”
Liffey was quite cold with shock. Gentlemen did not kiss and tell, but Tucker, after all, was no gentleman. And secrecy rose out of guilt, but Tucker felt no guilt: and if Mabs knew, what was there to stop her telling Richard?
Tucker’s hand was unbuttoning her Mothercare blouse.
“No please, Tucker.”
“Why not?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Anyone can see that. It’s not comfortable in here. Come out on the grass.”
“No.”
“Why not? What you do
once you can do twice.”
“Tucker, I can’t, I mustn’t. Please. My back still hurts.”
“I expect it does, at that,” he said kindly. “I’ll be over in a day or two. No hurry.”
He started the engine and they bumped back to the cottage.
I can deny it, thought Liffey wildly. I can deny everything. That’s all I have to do. Tell Richard that Tucker tried to rape me—tell Richard I’m coming up to London, I can’t stay here, he has to think of something, some way we can live together.
Liffey packed a hessian bag with some meagre belongings, hitch-hiked with a startled salesman to the station, and used the last of the week’s housekeeping for a ticket to London. She had to change trains at Westbury, wait two hours for a connection. The journey took five hours. She wondered how she had ever thought Richard could do it daily. She arrived at Ray and Bella’s at half-past nine in the evening.
Events
Helga was cleaning up the kitchen. Liffey had met Helga once, in the old days, and not bothered to speak to her, since she was an au-pair, and au-pairs, like servants, were uninteresting. Helga did not much like Liffey but was shocked by her appearance. What had seemed gamine now seemed undernourished, ill and almost ugly. Helga told Liffey that Bella, Ray and Richard were at the pictures. In fact Ray was at a discotheque with Karen, but she thought that fact could perhaps emerge mpre kindly in the course of time.
“I only stay for the children,” said Helga. “Every night I get to bed at midnight. It is a very messy family.”
“Doesn’t Richard do a lot of baby-sitting?” asked Liffey. For that was how Richard described his evening occupation: sitting in the kitchen, working on papers from his briefcase, while the rest of the household had a good time.
“Oh yes,” said Helga. “Of course.”
At midnight Richard and Bella came home. Ray wasn’t expected until after two. Helga intercepted them in the hall.
“Liffey’s here,” she hissed.
“Oh Christ,” said Richard, furious. He had pushed Bella into her house with his buttocks and was looking forward to thus edging her up the stairs.
“Ask her up,” said Bella. “She might as well know. Everyone might as well know.”
She had been drinking. So had Richard.
“I couldn’t be so cruel,” said Richard. “She only has me in the world.”
But he stood undecided until Helga pushed him into the kitchen, and Liffey ran into his arms.
Liffey did not mention Tucker. She merely said she missed him so much she’d decided to come to London on the spur of the moment.
“But where are you going to stay?”
“I can share your bed, Richard.”
“My bed is the sofa. But you can have that tonight and I’ll sleep on the floor. I’ve got meetings all tomorrow too. I was hoping, just for once, to get some sleep.”
The temptations of power are indeed terrible. Richard succumbed to them. To hurt, subtly, yet appear not to hurt, made up for a little of his sense of loss in regard to Bella.
Liffey slept badly on the sofa. The noise of the London traffic kept her awake. Yet it appeared friendly and companionable. She wondered how she had ever found it oppressive. To look out of the window and see not grass and cows, but people and buildings, and the safety of civilisation—was this not good fortune? Not for nothing had men yearned, over the generations, to escape the solitude of the countryside and make for the pleasures of the town.
Too late.
Breakfast with Ray and Bella was humiliating.
“Well,” said Ray, “pregnancy has certainly made you look more like a woman and less like a boy. Everything going all right?”
“Well,” said Liffey, “it’s not really. They say I have to have a Caesarian.”
“They give everyone Caesarians these days,” said Bella, “at the drop of a hat. The hospitals have to justify their monstrous expenditure on capital equipment. So the knife’s back in fashion.”
“But I have a placenta praevia,” replied Liffey. “It has nothing to do with fashion.” But Richard was reading The Times, and Ray and Bella fell into an argument as to who was to talk to the Selfridges’ fish buyer.
“I suppose you’ll be meeting Karen out of school,” said Bella. “That’s why you can’t do it.”
“She has her A-level art today. I said I would, Bella. She’s only a kid. She depends on me. Her own father neglects her terribly; she has to have someone.”
“Oh yes. Incest’s so fashionable.”
“You are disgusting,” said Ray. “You see sex in everything.”
“Please,” said Helga, “not in front of the children.”
Liffey, out of the city for six months, started to cry. Mabs and Tucker back home, plotting: Richard reading his newspaper here, indifferent. Liffey fainted.
Helga took Liffey round to Bella’s doctor, since Richard had an important meeting at half-past nine. The doctor said her blood pressure was up, what was she doing gadding about London, she should be safely at home in the country, and with a placenta praevia, anyway, she should try not to be too far from the hospital where they had her records.
“I’m not trying to frighten you,” said her doctor. “I just don’t want you to be silly. You have to think of the baby.”
Liffey rang Richard’s office and got Miss Martin and left a message. Miss Martin gave Richard the first part, that Liffey was on her way home, but left out the part about the blood pressure and staying near a hospital, as he had another important meeting and she didn’t want to worry him.
Liffey remembered on the way back in the train that she had no means of getting from the station to Honeycomb Cottage, and cried.
But Tucker was waiting for her at the station. It seemed inevitable. She did not even ask him how he came to be there. In fact, Richard had rung through and asked him to meet Liffey. Miss Martin had dialled the call with reluctant fingers.
“I can’t stand helpless women,” said Miss Martin. “It isn’t fair. If you’re silly and helpless like your wife, you get looked after. No one ever looks after me.” And she cried into her typewriter—the big, ugly sobs of despised womanhood.
Later that morning Miss Martin said that she wanted to confess to Jeff, and Richard knew that once she did, once her guilt had been evaporated, puffed away in a careless word or so, she would begin to see herself as a proper person, with feelings to be considered. She would stop being a humble typist, grateful for her boss’s caress, and see herself as a mistress, with claims and aspirations to all kinds of impossible things.
Richard regarded his situation as dangerous. “You’d be unwise to tell Jeff,” he said as casually as he could manage, knowing that those who want too badly never get, and that to care too much is to lose power. “He’d only get upset. It’s not as if you and he ever slept together. You’re doing him no harm; I’m only warming his bed for him a little.”
It was a phrase Bella used. Bella’s phrases, through all their lives. Even Karen had to put up with it. Bella was feeling thwarted and unsatisfied too. She seemed to be becoming a danger. She said there ought to be more, somewhere, somehow, the other side of sexual acrobatics. She bought Richard a flat Victorian carpet-beater and asked him to thwack her bottom with it, but either her flesh was not young and smooth enough to be excited by chastisement or he did it wrong, for all that happened was that Helga threatened to give in her notice, since the noise they made upset the children.
“You must not,” said Helga. “I will have to speak out. Mr. Ray will find out and we will all be murdered.”
Bella laughed at the idea of Ray as murderer. Part of her wanted to be murdered, another part of her wanted Ray to know, another part wanted the nights with Richard simply to continue.
So did Richard.
“Helga loves the drama,” said Bella to Richard. “She hasn’t the guts to do it herself, so she lives through us.”
“Perhaps you ought to be quieter,” suggested Richard. “It might upset the children
.”
“Christ,” said Bella. “It’s how they were born, weren’t they?”
Bella could justify anything in the world she wished to justify, thought Richard. Perhaps everyone could.
Ray bought Karen a pound of the first cherries of the season. She bit into them with her little white teeth. Red cherry juice ran down her chin. In the car he held her hand and bit into it with his own rather yellowed teeth.
“Your chin’s all stubbly,” she said. Peter’s hair grew fine and soft on his chin. Peter was young. Ray was old. She had not told Ray about her boyfriend, Peter, a gardener drop-out, with whom she was sleeping. She thought he might be hurt.
Richard rang Vanessa, but she was off to a summer school for the New Altanteans, where communication was through the spirit, not the body.
Richard thought about giving up Vanessa. Vanessa didn’t think about it at all.
As for Liffey, little Liffey: Liffey lay naked on the bed, on her side, while Tucker entered her from behind. To submit gracefully, calmly, had seemed the best way of protecting herself and her baby and her blood pressure. Tucker had met her at the station: she owed him something for that.
“You shouldn’t go rushing up to London like that,” he said. “Bad for the baby. Bad for you. I wasn’t going to harm you. Do anything you didn’t want.” He spoke kindly, and what he said was true. He was concerned for her. She was grateful. Liffey grateful to Tucker!
He took her home, made her put her feet up, and made her tea. “I don’t know what you’re so frightened of,” he said. “All you’ve got to do is what you want.
“I know what pregnant women are like,” he said. “I’ve had Mabs pregnant more times than I can remember. I like the feel of my child inside.”
“It’s not yours,” she whispered. But she did not persist. She had to stay calm and bring her blood pressure down. Liffey felt the baby warning her. Careful now. Lie down. Do as he wants. It doesn’t matter.
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