Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (14 page)

 
          
Although all was not well
without, all
was very well within. Liffey’s uterus had settled down nicely after its recent
state of confusion. It lay like an inverted pear, settling upon the upper end
of her vagina, narrowing into the cervical canal, finished off (where in a pear
the stalk would be) by the cervix itself. This, on a good day, could be
detected by Richard’s engorged penis as a hard knob, and by a doctor’s hand as
a firm, dome-shaped structure. The walls of Liffey’s uterus were some half an
inch thick and composed of a whole network of muscles, some up and down, some
oblique, some spiral, all extraordinarily flexible, and all involuntary—that
is, uncontrollable by the conscious Liffey. The blood supply, simple, ample,
and good, came from the main blood vessels in Liffey’s pelvis; and the nerve
supply, anything but simple, enabling as it did the muscles to contract
rhythmically during menstruation and more dramatically during labour, would
only send messages of discomfort when uncomfortably stretched. These nerves
could be cut or burned or ulcerated and Liffey would be none the wiser.

 
          
Now,
as the fifty-first of Liffey’s potential ova for the month
ripened,
the walls of the uterus lined themselves richly and healthily in preparation
for its fall and fertilisation. Liffey’s Fallopian tubes (the pair of ducts
attached to the outer corners of the uterus) waited too, secreting from their
own mucous membrane the substances that nourished all visiting sperm and, more
rarely, any fertilised ovum. Of the four hundred million sperms that Tucker had
released into Liffey the week before, on the sixth day of her cycle, some forty
million had reached her cervical canal, but only a few dozen had survived the
quick, forty-five-minute journey up the uterus and along the Fallopian tube.
Here, in spite of the warm, sugary, gently alkaline environment that did its
best to preserve and nurture them— and Tucker’s were good strong sperm—all had
inevitably perished, since no ovum arrived within the forty-eight hours of
their life span. All died, but surely, surely, some molecular vestige of Tucker
remained within Liffey?

 
          
One
way or another, like it or not, we are part of more people than we imagine: one
flesh.

 
          
Be
that as it may, on the fourteenth day of Liffey’s cycle, now nicely
re-established at twenty-eight days, an ovum released by Liffey’s left ovary,
and swept up by the fimbriae, the little fingers of tissue existing where the
Fallopian tubes curl round to meet the ovary, swam into the healthy canal of
the tube itself.

 
          
Liffey knew nothing
of all this. She
gave these matters even less attention than a car driver might give to his car.
All she knew was that it was Friday night and that she was looking forward to
Richard’s return, that dinner was cooked, candles lit, and everything in order.
She wore a swirly skirt, a blouse instead of a T-shirt, and scent. Everything in
fact was ready and prepared—an outer symbol of an inward state.

 
          
In
the conscious and the unconscious world alike, this is the pattern. Things are
made ready, offerings are prepared, fulfilment is hoped for, and sometimes
occurs. The cosmic soup prepares for life; birds prepare nests, men prepare for
war, wombs prepare linings, priests are prepared for ordination. Friday washing
and ironing prepares for Saturday Sabbath. It was not surprising, then, that
Liffey prepared for Richard and found pleasure in it.

 
          
Things
get ready,
then
burst into life. Nature, like its
subsidiary processes of love and friendship and learning, proceeds by halts and
starts.

           
Reverently, Richard made love to
Liffey. She found him gentler and more considerate than ever, and although
this should have gratified her, she found it oddly irritating.

 
          
Richard
was not gentle with Bella, nor had been with the motorway whore he had picked
up on the journey away from Liffey, back to
London
, the previous Sunday night. They were the users-up
of surplus seed, not of intended seed; they were instruments of his anger,
inasmuch as a man who has conscientiously decided to respect and adore his
wife, to project rather than to incorporate his resentment of her, must find
something to do with his anger, and the erect penis can be used to punish and
destroy as well as to love and create. So can soft words.

 
          
These
were the five women Richard had made love to since his adolescence. Mary
Taylor, a forty-year-old barmaid, whose habit and pleasure it was to seduce
sixth-form boys from the local boarding school.

 
          
Liffey, his wife.

 
          
His secretary, on the occasion of a drunken office party.

 
          
Bella
Nash, his friend and landlady and best friend’s wife.

 
          
Debbie, a fifteen-year-old delinquent who travelled the motorways.

 
          
His
encounter with Debbie of the unknown last name, precipitated by fate and the
emotional tumult brought about by sudden self-knowledge—or else by a physical
irritation induced by Mabs’s mistletoe and Mayflower—and his on the whole
unvoiced resentment of Liffey’s recent behaviour, had gratified and satisfied
him. To use, pay, and forget a more than willing girl hurt, so far as he could
see, no one. It did not interfere with his uxorious love of Liffey, his more
complex and imaginative lust for Bella, or his work.

 
          
If
Richard was saddened by anything, it was by the new knowledge of years of
sexual opportunity lost—a common enough sadness in those whom circumstance or
conditioning have prevented from making full use of youthful sexuality.

 
          
Richard
resolved that while he could he would, that Liffey’s living in the country,
though adventitious, would in the end help them both. It would help him,
Richard, to know himself, and by knowing himself, to love her, Liffey, better,
and in the end, surely, as they both grew older, to love and want Liffey alone.
He could see fidelity as something to be travelled towards, achieved in the
end; and the journey there could surely be made as varied and exciting as
possible.

 
          
Mabs,
the while, lay in bed with Tucker and laughed out loud.

 
          
“Now what?”
He was nervous.

 
          
“I
don’t know,” she said. “I just feel things are going the way I want.”

 
          
“Up
at Honeycomb Cottage?”

 
          
“That’s
right.”

 
          
“Leave
them alone,” he begged. He should never have let himself be pushed by her,
right into Liffey. She’d done it to him before, once, with a former
schoolfriend she’d come to envy.

 
          
“That
Angie,” Mabs had deplored with sudden savagery, “what’s she got to be so stuck
up about anyway?” And Tucker had been sent over before Angie’s big wedding, and
Angie had ended up with an arm mangled in a hopper, and a drunk for a husband,
and one single stone-deaf child, big wedding or not. It was as if he, Tucker,
had been sent in to prepare the way: make an entry through which Mabs could
pour ill wishes.

 
          
But
these were night thoughts. In the morning, he knew, Mabs would be just another
farmer’s wife, in
Wellingtons
and head scarf.

 
          
He
rolled over her, as he could feel her needing, as he knew controlled her, if
only for a while. Mabs was a sweep of forested hill, of underground rivers and
hidden caves, and dark graves and secret powers. Liffey was a will-tree, all
above ground. He liked Liffey. He would do what he could to protect her.

 
          
Well,
thought Liffey, lying there, revered by Richard, at least he loves me. He won’t
get into trouble in
London
. For she saw now that sexual opportunity is more powerful than sexual
discrimination, and that by and large those who can, will, and there was
Richard, by himself in London all week, and a young and handsome man, although
of course Bella would keep an eye on him for her—and what’s more, it had all
been her doing.

           
“I miss you and love you,” said
Richard as they lay together, wind and rain swirling around the chimneys
outside, snug and warm beneath a hundred-per-cent-eiderdown quilt from Heals
—and it was true. He missed her and loved her. She was his wife.

 
          
She
missed and loved him. He was her husband.

 
          
Meanwhile some forty million
of
Richard’s sperm were starting their migration from the vault of Liffey’s vagina
to the outer part of her Fallopian tubes. Her orgasm, or lack of it, made no
difference to their chance of survival. The sperms had been formed in the
testicles suspended in the scrotum beneath Richard’s penis. Here too the male
hormone testosterone was formed. Richard’s testicles produced perhaps a little
less than average of that particular hormone, rendering him in general kind and
unaggressive, not given to using force to solve his problems, and needing to
shave only once a day, not twice —but not so little that he did not berate Mory
over the telephone and feel the better for it. It was some months since
Richard’s sperm had been so plentiful.

 
          
The
electric blanket he and Liffey loved, and which now Mory and Helen delighted
in, had overheated his testicles, and together with the tight underpants Liffey
so admired, had overheated and overconstricted his testicles, thus causing a
degree of infertility. But now, deprived of the electric blanket, wearing more
comfortable pants, the sweat glands of his scrotum were once again able to
maintain the testicles at their correct temperature and enable spermatogenesis
to occur. The sperms, once produced, were stored in the slightly alkaline, gelatinous
fluid produced by his prostate gland, which lay at the base of the bladder at
the root of the penis.

           
Richard ejaculated four millilitres
of seminal fluid, each containing one hundred million sperm, well within the
normal sperm count (which can vary between fifty and two hundred million sperms
per millilitre and be ejaculated in quantities between three and five millilitres).
Each sperm was about one-twenty-fourth of a millimetre long and consisted of
head, neck and tail. The head of the sperm contained the chromosomes required
to fertilise the ovum. The neck contained the mechanism that moved the tail.
The tail propelled the sperm forward, at a rate of one millimetre every ten
seconds—not bad going for an organism so very small. If it came up against a
solid object it would change direction, like a child’s mechanical toy. So
doing, a sperm would even get by a cervical cap, or the vinegar-soaked sponge
Liffey’s grandmother used to trust before she had Madge. Liffey’s cervical
canal was that day receptive and benign to Richard’s sperm: the mucus there,
mid-cycle, had become transparent and less viscous than normal. As the hours
passed, so the sperm moved, readily and more plentifully than Tucker’s before
them, up into Liffey’s Fallopian tube.

 
          
Saturday morning came,
and lunchtime,
and then it
was
time for supper.

 
          
Mabs
suddenly and unexpectedly leaned forward and slapped Eddie for slurping his
tea. He cried. She slapped him again and snatched away his bacon and baked
beans. All the children snivelled. They were having a late tea. Earlier Tucker
had taken Mabs to the pictures.

 
          
“What’s
the matter with you, then?” asked Tucker. “Can’t you just leave the children
be?”

           
But she couldn’t. Something had gone
wrong. She knew it had.

 
          
Baked
beans fell from Mabs’s fork on to her tweed skirt. Audrey ran for a damp cloth.

 
          
“Little
creepy crawler,” said Mabs to Audrey, but she took the offered cloth, and
darted Tucker an evil, glinting look as she wiped, as if it was all his fault.
He knew she was thinking about Liffey.

 
          
“You
sent me up there,” said Tucker. “It was what you wanted.”

 
          
Mabs
strode about the kitchen, her face distorted. Tucker nodded sideways to the
children, who slipped away quickly.

 
          
“Calm
down,” said Tucker. He was frightened, not knowing which way Mabs’s anger was
to turn. Mabs stood at the window and looked at the Tor, and he could have
sworn that as she did, the clouds that hung above it swirled and churned in the
moonlight.

 
          
“How
funny the clouds look above the Tor,” said Richard to Liffey. They stood side
by side on the stairs, leaning into each other dreamily.

 
          
“They
often look funny,” said Liffey. “It quite frightens me sometimes. But it’s just
air-currents.”

 
          
Richard’s
sperm, now in Liffey’s left Fallopian tube, had there encountered a fully
fledged ovum, some five hours old and in good shape. By virtue of the enzymes
that they carried en masse, they liquified the gelatinous material that encases
the ovum, enabling one of their number to penetrate the ovum wall, running into
it head first, leaving its tail outside.

 
          
And
there, Liffey was pregnant.

 
          
“I
do love you,”
lied
Richard.

 
          
“I
love you,” said Liffey.

 
          
“Calm
down,” said Tucker to Mabs once again, and, surprisingly, she calmed down. She
moved away from the window.

 
          
“It’s
her I blame,” said Mabs, smiling at Tucker, “not you. Did she wear a bra?”

 
          
“No,”
said Tucker.

 
          
“Well,
there you are,” said Mabs, as if that explained everything. And then, “What’s
bad news for some is good news for another.” It was something she often
said,
and her mother too. Dick would say it to Carol
sometimes, referring to Carol’s husband, Barry, as a counter-point to their
love-making, making Carol laugh.

 
          
“Tucker,”
said Mabs. “What size shoe does she wear?”

 
          
“Little.
Three or four, I should say.”

 
          
Mabs
looked down at her own large feet and sighed. She scraped all the children’s
teas into the pig-bin, yelled down the corridor for them to get to bed, and she
and Tucker went to their bedroom together, like an ordinary couple, and she not
at all hooked up to the hot lines of the universe.