Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (16 page)

 
          
Inside Liffey
a cystic space appeared
in the morula of her pregnancy, which now could be termed a blastocyst. It grew
sprout-like projections, termed chorionic villi. It drifted down towards the
cavity of the uterus. So each one of us began: Nature sets us in motion, Nature
propells us. It is as well to be acknowledged.

 
          
And
by Nature we mean not God, or anything that has intent, but the chance
summation of evolutionary events that, over aeons, have made us what we are,
and starfish what they are, and turtles what they are, and pumpkins too, and
will make our children and our children’s children what they will be, and an
infinitesimal improvement—so long, that is, as natural selection can keep pace
with a changing environment—on what we are. Looking back, we think we perceive
a purpose. But the perspective is faulty.

 
          
We
no longer see Nature as blind, although she is. Her very name is imbued with a
sense of purpose, as the name of God used to be. God means us. God wills us.
God wants for us. We cannot turn words back: they mean what we want them to
mean; and we are weak; if we can not in all conscience speak of God we must
speak of Nature.
Wide-eyed, clear-eyed, purposeful Nature.
Too late to abandon her.
Let us seize the word, seize
the day, lay the N on its side and call our blind mistress ature.

 
          
On
Thursday night the calm of the Nash household was disturbed. Ray and Bella had
a row. Both thought they behaved as rational people do when provoked beyond
endurance, and both were in error. Ray and Bella acted as people act when their
metabolisms are disturbed, as Mature works its terrible, disintegrating changes
in the aging body, and the messages received from the outside world are both
distorted and distorting.

           
Bella wept. Ray shouted. Ray said he
was in love with Karen because she was sixteen, had a mass of red hair and a
tiny mouth.

 
          
“It
isn’t love,” cried Bella. “It’s lust.”

 
          
“It’s
love, Bella, love,” he shouted, and the volume of his voice made African
objects d’art, lean mahogany phallic things, tremble on the pine bookcase.

 
          
“But
she’s a fool. How can you love something that’s less than you?”

 
          
“Perfectly
well,” he shouted.

 
          
“What
do you mean by love?” she yelled.

 
          
“What
any teenager means.”

 
          
“You’re
not a teenager. You’re a poor impotent old man.”

 
          
“And
you’re a jealous old cow.”

 
          
She
snatched up a sharp fruit knife and advanced upon him and he was frightened and
fled, and in the bedroom Helga, reading Tina and Tony their bednight story,
raised her voice and tried to protect her charges from the noise of adult life.

 
          
Bella,
having taken up her knife and wielded it, felt better. She was indeed jealous.
Mature had rendered her jealous, thus giving her children (or so
Mature thought, living as she does so much in the past) a better chance of
survival.
Even as Bella was ashamed of the emotion, so did acting upon
it fulfil and satisfy her—as to act upon all the major impulses that Mature
dictates —whether they be aggressive, defensive or procreative—fulfils and
satisfies.

 
          
If
it feels right, it is right, according to Mature, but not, alas, to man. At the
same time as feeling better, Bella felt ashamed, and upset, and confused.

 
          
The
voice Bella gave to confusion, grief and resentment was the more violent
inasmuch as her unused ova—laid down, waiting for delivery, when she herself
was still in the womb—were beginning to atrophy with age, and her cyclic
production of oestrogen and progesterone was at a critically low level. She was
suffering, as the months went by, from an increase in premenstrual tension and
from mild indigestion. She was forty-four—an early age for such symptoms of
menopause, the average being forty-eight point five—but such things happen.
Though, by and large, those whose periods begin early continue late. In sexual
matters, to those that have is given more.

 
          
The
voice that Ray gave to anger and despair was the more violent inasmuch as his
supply of testosterone was uncomfortably diminishing, leaving him prone to
sulks, moods, depressions and outbursts of rage. Karen, being young, even-tempered,
clear of complexion and of spirit, seemed the more enchanting. He felt that
youth was infectious, and it was true enough that by stimulating his sexual
appetite Karen might stimulate his supply of testosterone and make him better
tempered, for a while. In the meantime his tongue was acid and his moods were
black.

 
          
Presently
their parents stopped shouting, crying and stamping, and Tina and Tony slept.
Next morning Helga swept and cleaned with a set face.

 
          
“I
only stay because of the children,” she said. It was her theme song. She ironed
Richard’s shirts beautifully.

 
          
“How
can I thank you?” he asked.

 
          
From
her look he could tell. He wondered why he had suddenly become so desirable to
the opposite sex, and concluded it was because he had become available.

 
          
Richard,
observing Helga, suspected that there was perhaps a fourth kind of woman and a
fourth kind of sex.
Helga,
and sex-as-payment. Helga
would iron his shirts and then demand to be brought to orgasm. She would work
as busily and concentratedly on that as she did on his shirts. As the iron was
to the shirt, so would his penis be to her satisfaction.

 
          
He
did not wish to put his theory to the test.
Later, perhaps.
Bella was upset enough as it was.

 
          
“You
know,” said Bella on Friday night, after he had sent Liffey a telegram to say
he’d been delayed at a meeting and would return on Saturday morning, “you’re
terribly angry with Liffey.”

 
          
“Why
should I be angry with Liffey?”

 
          
“Because
she won’t let you be a man. She wants you to be a little boy, so you can romp
hand in hand with her through green fields for ever.”

 
          
“I’m
not angry with Liffey,” he repeated.

           
“Yes you are. That’s why you’re
doing these terrible primitive things to me. I’m her stand-in.”

 
          
Richard
wished Bella would leave the inside of his head alone. There were a thousand
motives that could be attributed to every act, but none of them made the act
any different.

 
          
He
had been angry with Liffey. Now he was not. Or so he believed.

 
          
By
Saturday morning
the fine hairs of
the blastocyst inside Liffey had digested and eroded enough of the uterus wall
to enable it to burrow snugly into the endometrium and there open up another
maternal blood vessel, the better to obtain the oxygen and nutrients it
increasingly required.

 
          
This
implantation, alas for Liffey and her doctors, occurred in an unusual part of
her uterus—in the lower uterine segment.
Too far down, in
fact, for safety or comfort.
Perhaps this was a mere matter of
chance—perhaps, who’s to say, it was a matter of Mabs’s ill-wishing? If prayers
can make plants flourish, and curses wilt them, and all living matter is the
same substance, and thought has a reality, and wishing can influence the fall
of a die, and kinetic energy is a provable thing, and poltergeists can make the
plates on the dresser rattle, why, then, Mabs can curse Liffey’s baby, and
Liffey can protect it, as bad and good fairies at the christening.

 
          
Liffey
looked up at the sky and thought it was beautiful, and the blastocyst clung
where it could, not quite right but not quite unright, and growth continued and
the so-far undifferentiated cells began to take up their specialist parts, some
forming am- niotic fluid, some placental fluid, and some becoming the foetus
itself. The degree of specialisation that these later cells would eventually
achieve would be rivalled nowhere else in the universe, enabling their owner to
read, and write, and reason in a way entirely surplus to its survival.

           
Mature intends us to survive only
long enough to procreate. We have other ideas. Ask any woman past the
menopause, withering like a leaf on a tree and fighting the decline with
intelligence and oestrogen. Ask any man reading
Playboy,
whipping up desire. These extras too Mature gave us. Why?
Are we to assume Divine Intent, and fall on our knees, set the the right way
up, go back to Nature, and retreat to God? Never!

 
          
Liffey’s
child was to be male. Liffey contributed her share of twenty-two chromosomes
plus the X chromosome, which was all she could, being female, hand over.
Richard handed over twenty-two chromosomes, plus, as it happened, a Y sex
chromosome. Forty-four plus and XY makes a male. Had Richard handed over an X
sex chromosome—and there was a roughly 50 per cent chance that he would do
so—the forty-four plus an XX would have made a female. The sex of the child had
nothing to do with Liffey—who, left to herself, could only have achieved a
girl—but was determined by Richard.

 
          
The
ratio of male to female babies conceived is some 113 to 100, but by the time of
delivery has dropped to 106 to 100, since the male embryo is marginally the
more likely to perish. So Liffey’s baby, being male and placed too low in the
womb for maximum safety, already had a few extra odds working against its
survival. Nevertheless it had survived a few million obstacles to get this far,
and if there is such a thing as a life- force, a determination in the
individual of a species, as distinct from the group, not to give up, not to
perish, not to be wasted, why, then, Liffey’s baby had that determination.

 
          
On
Sunday morning
Tucker and two of his
children, Audrey and Eddie, came round to visit.

 
          
“You
didn’t go to church, then?” enquired Tucker.

 
          
“We’re
not really believers,” said Liffey.

 
          
Tucker
looked amazed.

 
          
“Somebody
had to make it all,” said Tucker.

 
          
While
their elders talked about the weather, crops, and cider apples, Audrey wandered
and Eddie leaned and fidgeted. They were not like Tony and Tina. They did not
believe the adult world had anything to do with them.

 
          
Audrey
wore platform heels three years out of date, a short skirt, holed stockings,
and a shiny green jumper stretched over breasts that would soon be as robust as
her mother’s. Her large eyes followed Liffey, making Liffey nervous, but
sometimes she would look sideways at Richard and smile. She sidled round the
perimeter of the room as if her natural habitat were out of doors.

 
          
Eddie
leaned against the wall, and shuffled from foot to foot, and fidgeted. His face
was pale and puffy, his little eyes were
sad,
he had
cold sores round his mouth, and coarse, stringy hair. If Audrey looked as if
she was biding her time, Eddie, at the age of eight, looked as if his had run
out. His nose dripped a thick yellow mucous, which from time to time he would
sniff back up his nostrils.

 
          
Eddie,
fidgeting and fumbling, pushed a glass ashtray from a shelf and broke it.

 
          
Slap
went his father’s hand across his cheek, and slap again.

 
          
“Oh
don’t!” cried Liffey and Richard in horrified chorus. “Oh don’t! It doesn’t
matter.”

 
          
“He’s
got to learn,” said Tucker, surprised, slapping again. Eddie snivelled rather
than cried, as if life, already despaired of, was now merely continuing on a
slightly more disagreeable level.

           
Liffey, half horrified, half
fascinated by this exercise of power, of parent over child, strong over weak,
raised her eyes and found Tucker looking straight at her.

 
          
Tucker
hadn’t forgotten. She knew he would be back.

 
          
Liffey
retreated to the kitchen to make real lemonade for the children from whole
chopped lemons, blended and then strained, and sweetened with honey. Audrey
followed her in.

 
          
Audrey
spoke.

 
          
“I’ve
had nothing to eat all day,” she said, “and won’t till the end of it, that’s
according to my mum. I was cooking bacon and eggs for all our breakfast, the
way she told me, but then she changed her mind and made me make the beds, and
when I came back breakfast was cold, and I said ‘Don’t make me eat that, I’ll
be sick,’ but she did make me, so I ate it, and then of course I threw up over
everything and she made me wipe it up and then she made me go to my room but my
dad made her let me out.”

 
          
Liffey
did not believe Audrey. Mabs loved children and wanted more. She often said so.

 
          
“Would
you like a sandwich?” Liffey asked all the same, but Audrey refused, having
taken a look at the brown wholemeal bread. “I only like white sliced,” she
explained, and then, as if in apology, “You be careful of my mum. She’s got it
in for you. You only see the side of her she wants you to see. You don’t know
what she’s like.”

 
          
It
was a clear warning, and Liffey disregarded it. Nobody nice, ordinary, and
well-meaning wishes to believe that she has enemies, let alone become the focal
point of energies she does not understand. Liffey had assumed a discretion and
secrecy in Tucker that did not exist: and that Mabs could have instigated the
seduction did not even occur to her, and that the same convulsions that animate
a mindless cluster of single cells—of division and multiplication within, and
incorporation and extrojection along the outside perimeter—apply to the whole
of existence, from galaxies to groups of human beings, she did not know. She
could not see the dance of the Universe, although she was part of it.

           
“You’ll feel better about your mum
tomorrow.” said Liffey, and offered Audrey some of her lemonade, but Audrey,
preferring the bottled kind, only distantly related to the lemon, declined to
drink.

 
          
Richard
went back to
London
. Liffey waited for Tucker to call, and was relieved when he did not.
She locked the door at night, and was placating towards Mabs, whose bulky
figure she would see at odd times of the day trudging over the fields, making
Liffey feel both secure and anxious. On Thursday, Liffey expected her period to
start, but it did not. Her pituitary gland, out of its accustomed season, was
producing extra progesterone, too much for menstruation to begin. The inner
surface of Liffey’s uterus had in general become highly secretive and active,
and thus would continue until the end of her pregnancy, whether this ran to
term or otherwise.

 
          
A
week passed. Two weeks. Richard came and went. They agreed that they loved each
other and that a little absence made the heart grow fonder, and that there were
things about the Universe that could be learned singly and that could not be
learned together. That these things included for Richard sexual knowledge did
not occur to Liffey. He gave an account of his days which included Bella and
Miss Martin, and she knew that Bella was old and his best friend’s wife and
that Miss Martin was stodgy and plain, and why should he anyway, since he had
her, Liffey; and Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights—on a good weekend—were
three nights out of seven.

 
          
Liffey
dug the garden. Dick Hubbard came over to inspect the roof, and told Liffey not
to bother with the garden since the soil was so poor it was a waste of time.
There were prowlers about, and the local prison was where they sent sexual
offenders, and the security was shocking and there were always break-outs,
hushed up of course, and Honeycomb Cottage was on the direct escape route, over
the fields, from the prison to the main road.

 
          
But
Liffey, who wished to harm no one, feared no harm.

 
          
Mabs
came over with seeds for the garden and talked of the prison working parties
too, describing the prisoners as without exception harmless and amiable.

 
          
Liffey
started a compost heap, having read that artificial fertilisers were the ruin
of the soil. Richard scoffed, and marvelled at his wife’s capacity for handling
what to him was better churned up as quickly as possible in a waste-disposal
unit. Mory and Helen failed to answer solicitors’ letters, pay rent, or answer
the door when Richard knocked upon it.

 
          
Illegal,
his solicitors said, to knock down your own front door. Wait, wait.

 
          
The
other side of the door Lally’s pains came and went. Her legs swelled. Spots
swam before her eyes and she had headaches.

 
          
“You
don’t think I should call a doctor?” she would sometimes say plaintively. But
Helen said no, doctors would only interfere with the course of Nature.

 
          
“I
think the baby’s overdue,” Lally ventured one morning.

 
          
The
flat was almost bare of furniture now. Bedding could not be burned
conveniently, as it filled the rooms with a choking smoke.

 
          
“How
can a baby be overdue?” asked Helen. “When a baby’s due it comes out,” and
Lally was obliged to admit that that was so. Helen was her elder sister and had
known best from the beginning.

 
          
Neither
Mory nor
Roy
liked to interfere. Helen had a determined
and positive nature—once given over to the winning of Pony Club rosettes and
hockey colours, since her conversion equally determined to bring about the New
Society. She smoked less than the others as they smoked more and more, which
gave her, if only by default, definite qualities of leadership.

 
          
“I
suppose the wicked weed doesn’t do the baby any harm,” murmured Mory.

 
          
“It
stops me feeling the pains,” said Lally, who had never at the best of times
been prepared to sacrifice comfort and entertainment, in the dubious interests
of the baby (“All these dos and don’ts are just punitive—part of the male plot
to make the pregnant woman miserable”—Helen) and at the moment felt happiest in
a stupor.

 
          
The
apartment became increasingly damp, dirty and uncomfortable. Helen declined to
make
Roy
’s coffee, Lally could not, and Mory did
not. There was no cooked food, and
Roy
felt bad without at least one dish of meat,
potatoes and vegetables a day. He started doing sums on pieces of paper and
concluded that he could not be the father of Lally’s child and moved out,
taking Helen’s amber beads and all their supply of marihuana with him. Helen
wept,
Lally groaned and started to haemorrhage. Mory ran
into the street and stopped a police car, which radioed an ambulance. Lally was
taken to hospital where the next day the baby was still-born, of placental
insufficiency, the baby being six weeks beyond term.

 
          
“Liars,
murderers,” sobbed Helen, when she heard the news. “You should never have
called them in, Mory.”

 
          
But
Mory had lost his faith in her, and threw about a great deal of Liffey’s
blue-and-white Victorian china.

 
          
Lally
went back to stay with her mother, “just for a time,” she said.

 
          
“Traitor,”
stormed Helen. “Don’t give her my love, whatever you do.”

 
          
The
doctors said that Lally’s fertility might be henceforth somewhat impaired, but
Lally did not mind, at least for the moment.

 
          
The
bank wrote another letter to Liffey, and Mory and Helen failed to pass it on.
But Mory made telephone calls to
Argentina
, in the weeks before the Telephone Company
acted on Richard’s instructions to disconnect the telephone, where he had heard
of a job and where truly creative architects, artists in concrete, were
appreciated. Helen said it was an impossibly reactionary and oppressive society
and they were not going to such a place, not even for a week, and Mory said he
was, he didn’t care about her.

 
          
Still
Liffey’s period did not begin. Three weeks late! She felt a little queasy and
put it down to some vague virus infection, and was sick one morning, and her
breasts were tender—but so they often were just before a period—and she had to
get up in the night to pass water, but put this down to a chill in the bladder.

 
          
No,
no, thought Liffey, I can’t be pregnant. Not this month. Not while Tucker might
be remotely connected with the event. Which surely he wasn’t, because surely—

           
Liffey discovered she knew next to
nothing about pregnancy or what went on inside her, and really had no
particular wish to know. It is hard to believe that the cool, smooth, finished
perfection of young skin covers up such a bloody, pulpy, incoherent, surging
mass of pulsing organs within: hard to link up spirit to body, mind to matter,
ourselves to others, others to everything. But there it is, and here we are.
Hearts beating, minds running; fuel in, energy out.

 
          
Liffey,
trembling on the edge of a train of a train of thought that would both enhance
and yet debase her, make her ordinary where she had thought herself special,
special where she had believed herself ordinary, was pushed by guilt and
trepidation to go into Poldyke and buy the one paperback book on pregnancy
that they had in stock.