Mabs, being pregnant, became quiet and kind, as if, in her, body alone dictated mood. She had no rational knowledge that she had conceived: only her body, setting off on its forty-week journey, conveyed a general impression of contentment, which the mind accepted.
Mabs came downstairs, smiled at the children, and brought them all fish and chips, and even lemonade to go with it.
The doctor came up to Cadbury Farm presently to say that Debbie was to be sent off to a convalescent home, and to take a general look around.
“Rather them than me,” said Mabs. “She’s a dirty girl. She wets the bed. Still,” she added magnanimously, “the others miss her.”
“You nearly lost her altogether,” said the doctor.
“No,” said Mabs, “I knew I wouldn’t.”
There had been no signs after all—no owls hooting out of nowhere, no lightning out of a clear sky, no yew brought into the house—no signs or portents. Only Mabs twisting a pin in a wax image when she should have left it to others—enough to damage and frighten but surely not to kill. Debbie had always been safe enough; but how could she tell the doctor a thing like that?
“I’d like to hear a little less about home remedies,” said the doctor, “and a little more about visiting the surgery when anyone’s ill.”
“Albright,” Mabs acquiesced. It was a genuine capitulation. She yawned. She was tired. It occurred to her that Tucker and she were not as young as once they had been.
She allowed the doctor to put Eddie on a course of antidepressants, and Audrey on the pill, and herself on Valium to cure the rages she now admitted to, and Tucker on vitamin B because he drank so much home-made cider. With every act of consent, every acknowledgment of his power, her own waned. She felt it. She didn’t much mind.
Mabs told the doctor that she and Tucker would fetch Liffey and the baby home from hospital. They’d look after Liffey. Well, the husband had finally gone off.
Liffey’s drips were removed. Her stitches came out. Snip, snip—eight times. The skin that had stretched and smarted around the catgut resumed its natural place. She could sit up now of her own accord. She could lie on her back and lift her legs. She could do without the physiotherapist, who thumped her hard from time to time to make her cough and clear her lungs. She could take a bath, albeit on her hands and knees. She rang her mother, hardly knowing what to say. Madge was cool but friendly and busy with a royal visitor to the school.
Mrs. Harris from the shop came to visit, and Audrey brought the curate, who saw God’s hand in the deliverance of both Liffey and Debbie. The incident had even reached the local paper. Audrey wished to be confirmed; he was undertaking it. Mabs and Tucker came with flowers. Tucker wore collar and tie and sat on the edge of his chair and seemed embarrassed by his surroundings, but he was robust and solid and dignified— powerful, dark and male in a pale female world.
And certainly as Mabs lost power, Tucker gained it. He knew it. He was rough with Mabs now; he told her what to do, he shouted at her if she behaved badly to the children. He recognised that she was deflated, that although she still stared at the Tor, the clouds around its summit neither reflected her will nor shadowed her intent. Her sly looks requested rather than commanded, and he performed at his own pleasure, and not hers. He thought she was a better mother, and high time too. As one set of energies drained out of her, others took their place.
Richard did not visit Liffey.
Ripples
Richard, after a whole week’s absence, unaccounted for and so far unexplained, went back to the office.
“Welcome back!” said Personnel. “We’ll ask no questions and be told no lies. You have a fine son and Mother’s doing well. Can we be of any help?”
“No, thank you,” said Richard.
He knew he had a son. His attention had been drawn to an advertisement in The Times that said, “Lee-Fox. To Liffey and Tucker, a son.” Miss Martin, Richard rightly guessed, had inserted it. Miss Martin, as did everyone in the company, via Vanessa’s connection with the director of the Canadian ox-tail soup television commercial, knew all about the fathering of Liffey’s baby. Malice does not evaporate: it bounces round like a rubber ball, striking here and there, sometimes in the most unexpected places, gradually losing energy. It almost stops. Then up it starts again—the cosmic ball of ill-will.
Richard wangled Vanessa another modelling job so that she could buy a car for herself, but after that left her alone. She had heard him weep: she would never respect him. The battle, he could see, was to find a woman who would.
He had spent the whole week with Vanessa. She had made him for a while believe that his work was unimportant, that he was only money-grubbing in a rat race: fortunately common sense reasserted itself. He wished to behave well towards Liffey, to shame her with kindness, to continue to support her. For that he would have to earn more. He owed it to his parents to get promotion, do well, carry on along the road on which they had first set his stumbling footsteps. He could not fail Liffey or disappoint them.
When he hated Liffey, it was because of the distress her behaviour would have given his parents. He put off telling them. How was he to put it? Yes, Mother, Liffey has her baby, but it is another man’s child. Not your grandchild. Not, after all that, after all those years, your flesh and blood.
Ah yes, I am sure. So sure. It explains so much. Why I betrayed her. It was all her doing. Once the sacred tie is loosed, chaos ensues; the forces of love, of trust and faith are in disarray: lust sweeps in. Liffey loosed them quite deliberately. Untied the snowy white robe of her purity and let Tucker in.
Mrs. Lee-Fox senior telephoned.
“Darling, what is happening? How’s lovely Liffey?”
Lovely Liffey had Tucker’s child, Mother.
Mrs. Lee-Fox senior wept. See, Liffey, what you have done? My mother weeps. All my life I have dreaded this minute, this moment. I knew it lurked somewhere, waiting.
Liffey, I hate you. I would kill you if I could.
Richard went to stay with Bella and Ray. Bella still couldn’t get over the way Liffey had behaved towards Tony and Tina.
“Not even bothering to pack their homework!” said Bella. “Not even making them a sandwich. They were dreadfully upset. I can’t help thinking you’re well out of it, Richard.”
“Next time choose someone who can cook,” said Ray. “Does that sound crude? But it’s no good being romantic. You’re past the age of falling in love.” Ray had felt infatuation for Karen, not love. Bella had explained it all. Ray was glad it was over.
No one has a baby alone. Every pregnant woman carries with her the aspirations, the ambitions and the fears of others— friends, relatives, and passers-by—and the good and ill wishes of such intensity as might put the sun right out.
Good Fortune
As Mabs’s ill wish evaporated, so Liffey’s good fortune returned. Or perhaps it was merely that now she carried the baby in her arms, the ordinary up-and-downness of life returned.
Tucker and Mabs brought Liffey home from hospital. Their car no longer reeked of menace. It was an ordinary shabby, littered family car. The baby seemed to enjoy the motion. Home was cosy and familiar. Mabs had put flowers in vases, Tucker had dug over the garden.
The telephone had been installed.
There was a pile of letters. One was from the bank to say that a final payment from the trust fund had been paid in on her last birthday but had inadvertently not been entered to her credit. Twelve thousand pounds. Another was from Mory and Helen. “Wonderful about the baby!” they wrote. “Just to say the flat’s yours if you want it, even without the £ 1000 Richard couldn’t raise. Mory’s been offered a wonderful job in Trinidad, and Helen can’t stand the British climate any more. She’s pregnant.”
Cruel Richard, thought Liffey. Cruel, cruel Richard. But she did not want the flat back. She wanted very few now of the things she had wanted before.
It was a wonderful month for late sun and over-ripe roses. Liffey could take off the baby�
�s clothes and let the sun get to his little chicken limbs.
The telephone rang. Friends, who had seen the announcement in The Times and wanted to know what was going on. Liffey told them. Liffey, they thought, was quite fun again.
Fortunately no one who knew Tucker and Mabs read The Times, so news of the announcement did not reach them. Personnel fired Miss Martin, however. Enough was enough.
On Friday nights Liffey would find herself nervous, wondering if Richard would come back—half wanting him to, half not. She needed the full width of the double bed for herself and the baby, rolling over in the night as he woke, to pick him from his crib and feed him. Richard would have been in the way.
“What’s his name?” people asked.
“Baby Lee-Fox,” she said. She was waiting.
Madge wrote out of the blue saying that the name of Liffey’s father had been Martin, and in retrospect he had behaved well according to his lights. They just weren’t Madge’s lights. Why didn’t Liffey call the baby Martin?
She called the baby Martin.
“After his grandfather,” she told milkman, dustman, postman proudly. They all came up the drive now.
The baby’s legs looked more human. He lay in his cot working rather than resting, making sense of the world, recognising kindness, censorious of carelessness.
There was a brief rain-sodden autumn. The last of the rose petals fell. A few last blackberries stayed on the brambles. The days became cold and short.
Eddie would come up with firewood; he liked to hang close by Liffey’s side. Audrey came to talk about sex, and religion, and whether she preferred the vicar to the curate, the former being older, wiser and richer, but married. Debbie, though still pale and fragile, would trudge over the fields, unasked, to get Liffey’s shopping. Liffey thought perhaps she was quite content with the company of children.
Local events became important in her life. Carol’s husband broke Dick Hubbard’s jaw in a brawl and was sent to the local prison for two weeks to teach him what the magistrates called a lesson. Carol did not visit him on visiting day but was seen in the car park in Dick Hubbard’s car. Public opinion finally turned against Dick Hubbard.
Mabs laughed. She and Tucker drank a bottle of sherry between them. They let Audrey have a sip. Mabs was pregnant; the price of beef was high, of foodstuffs not so high as usual; one of the dogs had a puppy unexpectedly: they were happy. Liffey lived in Honeycomb, properly subdued. It had taken them a year to achieve it. Christmas was coming.
Conclusion
Liffey’s baby lay in its cot by the fire and smiled. It seemed, to the outside eye, a perfectly ordinary baby. It spoke to Liffey, silently, but less and less as its body grew into better proportion to its being. It gave up all appearance of being in charge, of knowing best. It left all that to Liffey now.
Liffey looked at herself in the mirror and laughed. She thought she seemed a very average person: no longer pretty, or elfin, or silly, or anything particularly definite any more. She was much like anyone else. She thought that she too had become what Richard wanted. He had triumphed in his absence.
She put on another jersey. The baby wore two pairs of leggings. The wind turned to the north. Black clouds heaved around the Tor: sometimes it was obscured altogether by mist and rain. In the very cold weather the fire smoked to such an extent it would put itself out, like a scorpion that stings itself with its own tail. On Christmas Eve, Liffey ran out of kindling wood to relight the fire. It was raining, and the branches and twigs outside were wet and useless. She went into the outhouse and there found the withered remnants of Richard’s puffballs. They were tough, withered and leathery, and she remembered what Richard had said about their use as firelighters, laid them in the grate and lit them. They burned slowly, patiently and brightly, and she thought there was some good in them after all.
She wanted the baby to speak, to mark so momentous a thought, but his spirit was finally cut off from hers. He smiled at her and that was all.
The fire lit by the puffballs stayed in over the Christmas holiday, to Liffey’s satisfaction. The baby smiled at the flames. On Boxing Day a car drew up outside. It was Richard, and his arms were full of soft fluffy toys—white bears and pink fish and orange lions. Liffey thought that vitamin drops and disposable nappies would have been more sensible.
“Christ, Liffey,” he said. “I am sorry. I don’t care whose baby it is.”
Liffey opened the door, not without reluctance. But she knew the baby liked to see people. He enjoyed company more than she did. He would smile at everyone, Liffey told herself, at Mabs and Tucker and the postman and the milkman. But now the baby smiled at Richard too, claiming him for father, shuffler of the genes. Liffey knew that that was that. The baby claimed them all, everyone, as bit-part players in his drama, dancers in his dance, singers to his tune.
Come in, Richard. Here is Liffey.
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