Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (17 page)

 
          
News
quickly got back to Mabs.

 
          
Mabs
stood and stared at the Tor. It was very cold that day and deathly still. The
cows stopped rustling in the fields and the birds waited in the trees. Tucker
stayed out of the house and sent the children to Mabs’s mother.

 
          
“No
reason to think it’s mine,” said Tucker to the trees.

 
          
To
Mabs, Tucker said, “Just because she’s bought a book doesn’t mean she is.”

 
          
But
Mabs did not reply, and both knew, as surely as one knows a death before
it’s
verified, that Liffey was indeed pregnant.

 
          
Liffey
wondered: Mabs and Tucker knew.

 
          
Everything
Mabs felt but gave no voice to, partly because she scorned to, partly because
she did not have a vocabulary to express the complexity of the things she
felt—fear of ageing, fear of death, loss of father, fear of mother, hate of
sister, resentment of her children (who, once born, were not what she had meant
at all), jealousy of Tucker, sexual desire towards other women, pretty women,
helpless women; resentment of women who spread their possessions, their homes,
delicately around them and stood back in pride; envy of brainy women, stylish
women, rich women, women who could explain their lives in words—all these
things Mabs felt, surging up in a great wordless storm, on knowing that Liffey was
pregnant.

 
          
She,
Mabs, could stump about the fields and put her powerful hands before her, and
spread her fingers wide, and the whole power of the Universe would dart through
them—but what use was that to Mabs? It could not make her what she wanted to
be.

 
          
Mabs,
pregnant, felt the fury of her unconscious passions allayed and could be almost
happy. And so, pregnant, became ordinary, like anyone else, and used her hands
to cook, and clean, and sew, and soothe, and not as psychic conductors.

 
          
Mabs
knew too that there are only so many babies to go round and that if Liffey was
pregnant, she would not be.

 
          
Mabs
thought all these things, and since she could not voice them, then forget them,
she knew only that she liked Liffey even less than before and that the answer
to her dislike was not to keep out of Liffey’s way. No.

 
          
The
air grew warmer: the cows rustled in the fields; the birds found the courage to
leave the trees and look for food in the thawing ground: clouds passed easily
over and around the Tor.

 
          
Tucker
fetched the children back. Tucker liked the idea of Liffey being pregnant. It
was as if Mabs had barred the light of the world, eclipsing it, and suddenly he
could see round her, and all this time she had been hiding wonderful things.

 
          
Liffey
was in her fifth week of pregnancy. The baby was two millimetres long and lay
within a newly formed amniotic sac. Its backbone was now beginning to form.

 
          
Liffey
felt her tender breasts and thought, No, no, surely not. She was not ready to
have a baby. She had not grown out of her own childhood: a baby was something
that would grow at her expense: that would diminish her: that would bring her
nearer death. It seemed bizarre, not natural at all.

 
          
She
said nothing about it when Richard came home the next weekend. And he told her
that he thought Bella was a repressed lesbian and that Miss Martin had
announced her engagement in the local papers, and they both laughed a little,
but kindly, at the hypocrisies of the one and the modest aspirations of the other.

 
          
“As
for Helga,” said Richard, “she’s the original hausfrau!
The
three K’s.
Kirche, Kuche, Kinder
.
I thought women like that went out with the dinosaur. Of course she’s the size
of one.”

 
          
But
Richard’s shirts were clean and ironed, and he brought no washing home for
Liffey. She was glad of that. She was feeling a little tired.

           
She felt an increase in her sexual
desire for Richard. She wished to try new positions, but Richard seemed
embarrassed, so she quickly desisted, marvelling at herself. It was as if her
body, no longer needing to insist on procreation, had at last found time for
its own amusement. Richard went back to
London
on Sunday night. She hoped her conduct in
bed had not driven him away early.

 
          
On
the Monday morning Liffey was sick, and on the Monday afternoon went into
Crossley and bought, with some embarrassment, a pregnancy-testing kit, and by
Tuesday mid-day, having dropped some early-morning urine into a phial, adding
the provided chemicals, and putting it to set, soon knew that she was pregnant.

 
          
A certain
elation began to mingle with her fear. The sick
feeling, which might have been brought on by anxiety and uncertainty, lessened
a little.

 
          
Liffey
went round to Mabs.

 
          
“I’m
pregnant,” she said. “Can I use the telephone to ring Richard?”

 
          
“But
that’s wonderful!” cried Mabs, and insisted that they open a bottle of
blackberry wine to celebrate, and delayed Liffey getting to the telephone until
well after one o’clock, by which time Richard had gone to lunch.

 
          
Or
so Miss Martin said. In actual fact Richard had just kissed her gently on the
eyes to soothe away her tears, and she had had to break away from his embrace
to answer the telephone. The tears had come after a full office week in which
Richard had ignored her except for sending letters back for re-typing, and
reproving her in front of other people. She thought, she hoped,
that
the cause of his unkindness was her having announced
.her engagement to Jeff, but how could she be sure? She knew that tears
irritated him, but by Tuesday lunchtime could no longer hold them back.

 
          
And
instead of shouting, he kissed her.

 
          
“Who
was that?” asked Richard.

 
          
“It
was only your wife,” said Miss Martin, and he had to stop himself from striking
her.
Only
Liffey! He knew that Jeff,
poor Jeff, would end up beating her. She invited it, mingling tears with acts
of hostility.

           
“But it was your lunch-hour”—Miss
Martin put in her feeble excuse—“you said you didn’t want to be disturbed in
your lunch-hour.”

 
          
He
made her ring back Cadbury Farm and get Liffey on the line. But Mabs answered.
Her broad accent rang thick and strange in the quiet office.

 
          
“Your
Liffey’s here tippling with me,” said Mabs, “and she’s got something important
to tell you. She’s pregnant.”

 
          
There
was silence. Mabs had the receiver away from her ear. “I’ll bet that shook
him,” she said aside to Liffey.

 
          
Liffey
took the phone. There were tears in her eyes. She felt that a moment had gone,
lost, never to be recaptured. It was one in which she might have lost her fear
of having the baby and in Richard’s spontaneous pleasure learned how to accept
it.

 
          
“Are
you sure?” Richard was saying. “Liffey, are you there? You’re sure you haven’t
made a mistake?”

 
          
The
telephone went dead, and although Miss Martin, sobbing, denied that it was her
doing and did her trembly best to re-establish the connection, Liffey at the
same time was trying to get through to Richard, and by the time she did he had
indeed gone off to a meeting.

 
          
“Is
there any message?” asked Miss Martin, who had recovered her composure, and
blamed Liffey because she had lost it in the first place. “I’d ask him to ring
back, but he is so busy this week, and we’re expecting a call through on this
line from
Amsterdam
.”

 
          
Liffey
put down the phone.

 
          
“I
don’t like the sound of that secretary,” said Mabs. “She sounds for
all the
world like a wife.”

 
          
Knowledge of pregnancy comes early to
modern woman, perhaps too early, before body and mind have settled down into
tranquillity.

           
Liffey, all alone, trembled and
feared and cried. She thought that to be pregnant was to be ugly and that
afterwards her body would be spoiled—she would have pendulous breasts and a
flabby belly.

 
          
Her
mother, Madge, had strange creases over her stomach, flaps of ugly skin, for which
she held Liffey responsible.

 
          
“Stretch
marks!” she would observe, making no attempt to hide them. Madge viewed her
body as something functional: if it worked that was all she cared about. But
Liffey loved her body and cherished it: she feared maturity, she wanted to be
looked after for ever, to be placed physically at a point somewhere between
girl-child and stripling lad—hips and bosom all promise, waiting for some other
time, but not now, not now. Not yet.

 
          
Richard
wanted a boy-wife, she knew it. She knew it from the way he groaned at biscuits
and moaned at buns and worried in case she grew fat.

 
          
On
the way home from Cadbury Farm, Liffey slipped and fell, and lay for a moment,
stunned and shaken, with the world slipping and sliding about her.

 
          
A
face loomed over her. It was Tucker. Tucker helped her up and set her on her
feet, calmly and kindly. “You look after yourself,” he said. “And don’t go
drinking too much of Mabs’s wine. It isn’t good for you.”

 
          
Liffey
ran home, as quickly as she could over slippery ground, for light snow had been
falling, and locked the door. During the night more snow fell, fine and light
and driven by strong winds, which in the morning left a blue, washed sky.

           
And such a brilliant tranquillity of
white stretched across the plain to the Tor, broken only by the sketched
pencil-lines of the half-buried hedgerows, that tears of wonder came to her
eyes, and she felt better.

 
          
Richard
woke on Bella’s sofa to the sight of Bella’s books— the works of Man, not
Nature—and found it reassuring. The news of Liffey’s pregnancy had come as a
shock. He was glad, but not altogether glad.

 
          
If
Richard was to be husband and father, how could Bella continue his education?
How could he in all conscience continue to lie on his back with Bella on top of
him, wresting from him any number of degrading pleasures?

 
          
How
could he discover what it was in Miss Martin that made her cry when she lay
beneath him, as if she had the key to all the sorrows of the Universe?

 
          
How
could he discover the nature of Helga’s being, which he now passionately
desired to know?

 
          
But
to be a father! There was pride in that, and pleasure in looking after Liffey,
and wonder in the knowledge that a man was not just himself but so stuffed
overfull with life that there was enough to pass on—and here in Liffey was the
proof of it.

 
          
Richard
decided to give up Bella and Miss Martin and concentrate on Liffey.

 
          
It
was a decision he was to make frequently in the following months, as a
dedicated but guilty smoker decides to give up smoking.

 
          
Six
weeks. The limb buds of the foetus began to show.
The tail to
disappear.
The heart formed within the chest cavity and began the
activity that was to last till the end of its days. Blood vessels formed in the
cervical cord. Parts of the stomach and intestine formed.

 
          
Liffey
wondered how to be rid of a baby she did not want without telling anyone that
she did not want it.

 
          
Richard
wondered how to subdue in himself that part of his nature that did not dovetail
with his nature as husband and father.

 
          
Liffey
thought she was growing a malformed baby, which would have a lolling head and
tongue, and flippers for arms, finished off by Tucker’s black fingernails.
Liffey was guilty, in other words, and believed that no good could come out of
her.

           
Mabs walked about the hills and
fields, and the rain poured out of the heavens so hard it stirred up the ground
where she trod, and there was little to choose between heaven, or earth, or
her. The Tor vanished altogether, obscured by water, fog and cloud, in which,
occasionally, sheets of lightning danced. Earth, water, fire and air no longer
retained their separate parts.

 
          
Seven
weeks.
Budding arms and legs and little clefts for fingers
and toes.
Blood vessels throughout, and the liver and
kidneys forming.
A spinal
cord,
and a
well-shaped head with the beginnings of a face, and a brain inside. It was not,
all the same, conscious. It was an automaton, as the jellyfish are, and the
whole kingdom of the plants, and much but not
all of the
insect world. It was not yet truly a mammal. Mammals have the gift of
consciousness: decision can over-ride instinct, and often, but perhaps not as
often as we assume, does.

 
          
“You
are looking poorly,” said Mabs, and made Liffey a brew of ergot and tansy tea,
a rich abortifacient, which had, fortunately for Liffey but unfortunately for
Mabs, no effect on Liffey or her baby beyond giving the mother slight
diarrhoea. “This will do you good.”

 
          
Liffey
had become a little frightened of Mabs and drank whatever she suggested for
fear of offending her.

 
          
Richard
succumbed to loneliness, vague resentments of Liffey, various worries connected
with the varying saline content of the water flow at the soup works, and
fornicated as much as possible with Miss Martin and Bella.

 
          
“I
shouldn’t,” whispered Miss Martin. “Not if your wife is pregnant.” But she did,
and even left out her own contraceptive cap once, and fortunately did not get
pregnant, an episode that led her to believe she was infertile and did nothing
for her self-esteem. She knew nothing about ova—where they were or how long
they lasted. All she knew was that her very being cried out to have Richard’s
baby if Liffey did: and her conscious mind, that glory of the mammal kingdom,
did very little to protect her.

           
“Live as much as you can while you
can,” said Bella. “Before life and Liffey close in.” Bella was old, by Nature’s
standards, and her conscious mind had less trouble over-riding her instinctive
drives. All that remained of naturally rivalrous behaviour was her current
irrational dislike for and impulsive disparagement of Richard’s pregnant wife,
Liffey.

 
          
Mabs’s
period began, staining oyster-silk underwear. Mabs scrubbed away, hating
Liffey, and focused her ill-will. And in
London
, Helen looked up and saw the letters to
Liffey on the mantelpiece and said, “I suppose I’d better post those,” and did,
and Mabs at once felt better and actually baked a cake for tea.

 
          
Liffey
opened the letters and understood that she was no longer rich, that she was to
live as the rest of the world did, unprotected from financial disaster; that
she was pregnant and dependent upon a husband, and that her survival, or so it
seemed, was bound up with her pleasing him. That she was not, as she had
thought, a free spirit, and nor was he: that they were bound together by
necessity. That he could come and go as he pleased; love her, leave her as he
pleased; hand over as much or as little of his earnings as he pleased; and that
domestic power has to do with economics. And that Richard, by virtue of being
powerful, being also good, would no doubt look after her and her child and not
insist upon doing so solely upon his terms. But he could and he might, so
Liffey had better behave, charm, lure, love and render herself necessary by
means of the sexual and caring comforts she provided.

 
          
Wash
socks, iron shirts.
Love.

 
          
And
that to have been unfaithful was a terrible thing.
That
financially dependent wives
are more faithful than independent wives.
That she must go carefully.

 
          
Liffey
thought of all these things for the space of three days.

 
          
“You’re
looking worse,” said Mabs and offered Liffey more ergot and tansy tea, which
Liffey pretended to take but emptied instead into a pot plant, which was
altogether dead two days later. Had Liffey known this she might indeed have
drunk the tea.

 
          
On
the fourth day Liffey ran and ran up country lanes and over tough ground,
fleeing her past, and her present, and her mother, and trying to shake her baby
free. But the baby barely noticed any change in its environment. How could it!