Weldon, Fay - Novel 07

by Puffball (v1. 1)

  Of course what it’s all about, thought Liffey, with the calmness born of certainty, is that Mabs thinks it’s Tucker’s baby.

  “Have some puffball, Liffey,” said Mabs, “now Richard’s found it. I was hoping he’d forget, but no such luck.”

  “No, thank you,” said Liffey. Ah, that was wrong. She should have accepted, devoured her own flesh and blood. Or at any rate her own white, bloodless flesh. The life blood drained away. Too late.

  “Liffey,” said Richard, “you must at least taste. I insist. After all the trouble everyone’s been to.”

  Eat, said the baby. You must choose now not between good and bad but between the lesser of evils. Eat, smile, hope.

  “Really, Liffey,” chided Richard, “you’re supposed to be eating for two.”

  “Don’t upset her,” said Tucker. “Not in her condition.”

  “It’s an entirely natural process,” said Richard. “Nothing to worry about. African mothers go into the bush, have their babies, pick them up and go straight back to work in the fields.”

  They all looked at Liffey to see how she would take this.

  “And then they die,” said Liffey before she could stop herself. Open a chink to let doubt out and a tide of ill-will would surge back in.

  Bright, brave, bold! That’s the way, Liffey. If ever you fought, fight now.

  Liffey laughed, to show she didn’t mean it.

  “Exactly when is the baby due?” asked Mabs.

  “October tenth,” said Richard for Liffey.

  Mabs got up and rummaged in a drawer amongst old batteries, dried-out pens, bills, string, ancient powder puffs and tubes of this and that with stubborn tops, and rusted skewers, and brought out a leaflet the cat had walked upon with muddy paws. “The doctor gave me this,” she said. “After the fifth baby, in just about as many years. He said I might work it out for myself.”

  “Work what out?” Tucker was nervous.

  “When it was, you know, conceived. It’s wonderful the way they can tell these days. They know everything there is to know in hospitals.”

  “It was back in December or January some time,” said Liffey swiftly, vaguely.

  “According to this,” said Mabs, “it was over Christmas.”

  “We moved in on January seventh,” said Liffey thankfully.

  “So you did,” said Mabs. “Do you remember, Richard? What a terrible time you both had? You had to rush straight off back to London, Richard, didn’t you, and then that weekend poor Liffey had an upset stomach. I remember clearly thinking, You poor things if you expected a second honeymoon, you certainly aren’t now getting one. Such lovebirds you seemed. Of course if Liffey was pregnant, that explains her upset stomach.”

  “Yes I expect it does,” said Liffey.

  “Nothing to do with my cooking after all,” laughed Mabs. Then she seemed to look at the leaflet more carefully. “No, wait a minute. Christmas was your last period. The baby must have been conceived just around the time you moved in. I must say, Richard, you don’t lose much time! In between all that running around and train-catching. Remember?”

  Richard remembered very well. The days were seared into his memory.

  “Of course Tucker was over a lot, helping Liffey out,” said Mabs into the silence. “That’s so, isn’t it, Tucker?”

  Mabs laughed. Tucker grunted.

  “Of course you London people are different,” said Mabs, “but I don’t see anyone round here so easy about rearing another man’s child.”

  Nobody laughed or grunted or spoke.

  Richard blinked, as if by shutting his eyes he would then wake up into a more real and more believable world.

  Upstairs Debbie screamed, but the sound went unnoticed.

  “Do shut up, Mabs,” said Tucker, “or I’ll break your bloody jaw.”

  “I think you’d better take me home, Richard,” said Liffey. “I don’t feel very well.”

  The dull pain was gone but the piercing pain now seemed established as a permanent reality and was increasing in intensity. A sizeable segment of placenta had torn away from the uterine wall. Liffey, although ignorant of this fact—indeed, having known remarkably little of what had been going on inside her for the last nine months—nevertheless felt something was going wrong somewhere. Mabs’s allegations and revelations seemed to Liffey now of no particular relevance.

  But for Richard, of course, they were.

  “Home,” he said. “What do you mean by home, Liffey? I don’t think what we have is a home.”

  Mabs, Liffey realised, was on her feet, arm outstretched, pointing at Liffey, black eyes staring.

  “Thief,” she cried. “You stole what was mine. I hope you die.”

  “Richard,” observed Liffey, “I do have a pain. I think we ought to go.”

  “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes,” said Richard. “What do you think I am? A fool? I could see the way things were going.” But of course he hadn’t. All the same, the claim to knowledge lessened the humiliation just a little.

  Tucker spoke.

  “No reason to think it’s my baby,” said Tucker to Richard, man to man. “Might be yours, might be mine.”

  Richard turned his blue eyes, no longer merry but still crinkling, of executive habit, to Liffey’s, and found them abstracted. He slapped her. Her head shook and her body, but her look of indifference remained.

  “Don’t you see what you’ve done?” shouted Richard. He had trusted Liffey with the better part of his nature and she had betrayed his trust. There was, he felt, nothing good left in the world. And she had stolen so much of his past as well. She had invalidated so much—the love and concern she had elicited from him; his worry about the growing child; the guilt and inconvenience he had endured; the conscience, and indeed the money he had expended—all had been for nothing, had meant nothing, had been as little to Liffey as it had been, once, to his mother. And Liffey seemed not even to notice his distress.

  The placenta tore a little further. Liffey’s uterus began to bleed. No doubt Mabs’s curse—for curse it was, a malevolent force directed along a quivering outstretched hand, and not a mere overlooking or ill-wishing—had something to do with it, if only by virtue of the sudden alteration in Liffey’s hormonal levels, as shock and anxiety assailed her, and the rise in her blood pressure occasioned by sudden emotion.

  Liffey was not aware, so far, that she was bleeding. But the pain intensified.

  “Take me home, Richard,” said Liffey.

  Richard was staring at Tucker. Little grimy Tucker in his collar and tie. Richard did not really believe that Tucker, by virtue of his way of life, was his superior. Richard had been playing games, as the rich and confident will do with the humble and struggling. Richard despised Tucker.

  A wife may be unfaithful with a prince and not be considered defiled. Glory can be transmitted via the genitals. But Tucker!

  “Richard,” Liffey was saying, “I have to be looked after.”

  “Let him look after you,” said Richard, and left Mabs and Tucker’s house, head hunched into his shoulders, walking briskly, stonily through the yard, mangy dogs yapping at his crisp blue denim, Tony and Tina falling in behind, up the lane, looking neither to left nor right, to where his car was parked outside Honeycomb Cottage, and piled Tony and Tina in behind while they protested about hunger and clothes and homework left behind, and drove to London. Quickly, for fear of further pollution, as if evil followed him from the Somerset sky, as if Glastonbury was beaming out some kind of searchlight of dismay, meant especially for him.

  Richard too got to Bella’s publishing party in time, but he was feeling sick with misery, resentment and disillusion, and possibly also from Mabs’s dinner, and did not enjoy the party at all. Afterwards he went to see Vanessa, who was pleased to see him, in the way a rather busy person is pleased to see a stray cat, and told him she’d been stoned out of her mind for the last few weeks but had not reformed, and encouraged him to cry gently into the night for his lost Liffey w
hile she, Vanessa, rang girlfriend after girlfriend to discuss the ethics of whether or not she should own a car, positing the good of comfort against the evil of lead pollution of the sky. He heard himself referred to as a strung-out executive hung-up on a wife who was having it off with a cow-hand, and fell asleep, reassured by the ease with which words could modify experience.

  Tucker left shortly after Richard did. He just took the car and went.

  “You’d better walk on back up to Honeycomb, girl,” he said as he left. “There’ll be no sense out of Mabs for an hour or two.”

  Mabs strode the room, up and down, up and down. She seemed to have forgotten Liffey, who drooped over her belly, willing the pain away. The floor seemed to shake beneath Mabs’s footfall, although surely it was made of solid stone. Mabs seemed larger than life, like a giantess.

  Liffey’s baby was quiet. Liffey knew it was apprehensive: she had not known it like that before. All right, said Liffey to her baby, reassuring where no reassurance was, all right. She made a conscious effort to modify her own mood, to lessen shock and fright, to accept pain and not to fight it, as Madge had once tried to teach her, while Liffey had refused to learn. Little Liffey, long ago, refusing Madge’s knowledge that the world is hard and you’d better learn to manage it.

  All right, Mother, you win.

  Liffey stood up. Blood streamed down her legs. It was bright, almost cheerful.

  “Mabs,” said Liffey, “can I use the phone?”

  Thus the habit of politeness spoke, foolishly. Madge would just have grabbed before worse befall.

  Worse befell: Mabs, barely pausing in her pacing, answered by ripping the telephone wire out of the hall and throwing the receiver across the room and breaking it.

  “Mabs,” said Liffey, “I’m bleeding.”

  “Good,” said Mabs.

  Liffey went to the door.

  “Tucker,” she yelled, “Tucker!” There was no reply. There were tyremarks in the dust of the yard. Tony and Tina were gone. A swallow swooped down, and up again, and was gone. It was quiet. The dogs did not yap and prance as they usually did. They sniffed around, the rich red smell of Liffey’s blood, perhaps too strong and strange for them.

  Liffey had another pain now of a different kind—a more patient, slow, insistent pain, travelling round from back to front, as the uterus, damaged as it was, began the business of taking up the cervical canal.

  “Mabs,” said Liffey, “get me to hospital.”

  “Can’t,” said Mabs. “The car’s gone.”

  There was a trail of blood wherever Liffey moved.

  “Mabs,” said Liffey, “I’ll die.”

  “Good,” said Mabs.

  Missions of Mercy

  Audrey put her hand trustingly into that of the curate. Hers was warm and small. His was cold and bony. They were alone in the vestry, and he wished they were not.

  “What’s bothering you, Audrey?”

  Audrey sang loud and lustily in the choir but gave the impression in church of being some kind of emissary from a foreign power, and not a particularly friendly one at that. It might, he thought, have had something to do with the way her eyes roamed, with prurient speculation, over the males in the congregation. Most of them were elderly.

  “It’s my sister Debbie. She’s ill. She needs the doctor.”

  “Then surely your mother will fetch one?”

  “My mum’s not like that.”

  “But why come to me? Why not go straight to the doctor?”

  He knew the answer even as he asked. Audrey did not even bother to reply. Audrey fancied him. She did not fancy the doctor. He wished he were back in theological college. He did not know why he felt so helpless. Audrey’s hand, which he had thought to be so childish, moved like an adult’s in his, suggestively.

  “My mum says Debbie’s just constipated, but I know she’s not, because she keeps messing her pants, and I’m the one who washes them so I should know. And my mum keeps on giving her buckthorn.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s all right for the cows, I suppose. It’s just berries she boils up. Makes your mouth green.”

  The curate took back his hand. Audrey looked disappointed and concluded the interview.

  “Anyway,” she said, going, “I really am worried about Debbie.”

  Liffey stood bleeding in the yard of Cadbury Farm.

  Mabs had slammed the door behind her. The piercing pain was worse: her brow was clammy, her clogs were full of blood. She took them off.

  Well, thought Liffey, no good standing here. No good screaming, or crying, or fainting. No use lying down either. If I do nothing I will simply bleed to death. If it was only me, I wouldn’t mind. I really wouldn’t. I am not sure, on my own account, that I wish to stay in the world, considering its nature. What about you, baby? She felt the touch of its spirit, almost for the last time, still clear, still light and bright, almost elegant. The baby didn’t have to want to live, it was life. She felt the touch on her hand, and there was little Eddie, standing in front of her, looking up at her, mumbling something incoherent, talking about Debbie. He pulled her forward, down the lane towards the road.

  Liffey started walking.

  “Only blood,” said Liffey aloud. “Not even the baby’s blood. My blood. Lots more where that came from, Eddie.”

  But she wasn’t so sure. She walked as fast as she could, but she was also aware that that was very slow, because Eddie kept standing in front of her, facing her, waiting for her to catch up. And as soon as she did, he was off again. Pain counted now as sensation. It had to. She had no idea what the time was or how long she walked and bled. The sun glazed in the sky behind the Tor; it was surprisingly high. She walked into it. She did not suffer particularly. She travelled because she had to, as a bird might travel to a warmer climate, or a salmon cross the sea to the river it had to find.

  The curate, though delayed by Audrey, presently arrived at a drinks-before-Sunday-dinner party at the new solicitor’s house, and here he encountered the doctor, who was telling the solicitor’s wife, not without pride, of the extent to which the old herbalism was still practiced in the neighbourhood, and the fact that the village even boasted a wise woman, old Mrs. Tree, who claimed to have cured one of his terminal-cancer patients with stewed root of Condor Vine—and, admittedly, the patient was still in remission. The curate, casually enough, mentioned buckthorn berries and his conversation with Audrey, at which the doctor groaned, said all Sundays were much the same, left his drink unfinished and his wife without transport, and took off for Cadbury Farm.

  “His partner once had a child die from buckthorn,” said the doctor’s wife sadly. She finished her husband’s sherry. The new solicitor was not going to be lavish with the drink.

  The doctor found Liffey just where the lane joined the main road. He took Eddie into the car as well, since he could not leave a small, half-daft child standing by himself on a main road. He drove to the hospital, stopping briefly to talk to a policeman on the way.

  “Aren’t you going rather fast?” Liffey asked.

  “Not particularly,” he said. “Why didn’t you use the phone?”

  He went through a red light as if it wasn’t there at all.

  “It was out of order,” said Liffey.

  “Where’s your husband? Isn’t he home? It’s Sunday, isn’t it?”

  “He had to get back to London,” said Liffey easily. She rather enjoyed the ride; the piercing pain had dulled and she could now allow the other ones to come and go at will. She was sitting on a pile of curtains the doctor happened to have in the car, on the way to the cleaners for his wife. He had prudently put them under Liffey to save his car upholstery. What funny bright red damp curtains, thought Liffey. I’m sure I have better taste than his wife.

  Three nurses and a doctor and a wheeled stretcher, with two drips already set up, one clear, one red, waited at the top of the hospital steps.

  “I say!” said Liffey.

  “She might b
e drunk or something,” said the doctor. “She’s euphoric. Tell the anaesthetist,” and hoped they heard him as they ran down the corridor away from him.

  There had been valerian and coltsfoot in the elderflower wine; Mabs thought now that perhaps she had overdone the coltsfoot and made everyone quarrelsome, including herself. Well, it was too late now. What was done was done. She wiped up the blood on the doorstep and worked out a story to tell when Liffey’s body, with any luck, was found, and went upstairs to tell Debbie to stop that racket.

  The doctor had forgotten all about Eddie, but of course there he was, still sitting in the back of the car, crying.

  “Christ,” said the doctor. “This is supposed to be my day of rest.”

  He sped and jerked Eddie all the way back to the village, and then bumped and banged him all the way down the lane, and parked amongst the yowling dogs, because there was nowhere else, just as Mabs came out of the front door with Debbie’s unconscious, or dead, body in her arms. The doctor got out of the car and ran, kicking at the dogs. He’d forgotten about the buckthorn berries.

  “The phone’s out of order,” offered Mabs by way of explanation, “Eddie broke it, and Tucker’s gone off God knows where, and I came back in from the cows and found blood all over the step and Debbie fell out of bed and must have banged her head because I went up and found her like this.”

  “The blood is Mrs. Lee-Fox’s,” said the doctor, laying Debbie flat, running his hands over her stomach. She groaned. Good. “Fine neighbour you make—never in when you’re wanted. She’s in hospital now.”

  “My, that was quick,” said Mabs. “She was right as rain at lunch. Had a bit of a row with her husband, though. Well, she imagines things.”

  “Why was the child in bed?”

  “She’s dirty. Wets the bed. She’s got to learn. Is it bad?”

  “Ruptured appendix,” said the doctor. “Stands to reason. Help me get her in the car, quick.”

  “I’ll come to the hospital too,” said Mabs. “Might as well. Will Mrs. Lee-Fox be all right?”

  “I’d worry about the child if I were you,” said the doctor, but he’d known mothers like this many a time; the object of their concern shifted to something more tolerable than danger to their own child. At least he hoped it was that.