Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (18 page)

 
          
The wind sang
in Liffey’s ears and told
her she was wasting effort and energy, that all things were destined, that she
was what she was born and would never change, would for ever be the girl
without a father who wished she had no mother, and that though she ran and ran
she would never escape herself. As Liffey ran, so antelope run over the African
plain,
and kittens across the domestic lawn,
frightened by themselves, seeking refuge in flight, running as likely into
danger as to safety. Her muscles ached, her energy drained. Liffey stopped
running.

 
          
Liffey
looked about her. The rain, which had poured and poured for weeks, had stopped,
and the sky was washed and palest blue. She could still see the Tor, but now
from a different angle, so that its slope was less acute and the tower on top
was clearly man-made, not eternal. It was friendly, scarcely numen- istic at
all. It had been weeks, she felt, since she had looked about her and noticed
the world in which she lived. She saw that the leaf buds were on the trees and
that new bright grass pushed up beneath her feet, and that there was a sense of
expectation in the air. All things prepared, and waited.

 
          
Liffey
sat on the ground and turned her face towards the mild sun. She felt a
presence, the touch of a spirit, clear and benign. She opened her eyes,
startled, but there was no one there, only a dazzle in the sky where the sun
struck slantwise between the few puffy white clouds that hovered over the Tor.

 
          
“It’s
me,” said the spirit, said the baby, “I’m here. I have arrived. You are
perfectly all right and so
am
I. Don’t worry.” The
words were spoken in her head: they were graceful and certain. They charmed.
Liffey smiled and felt herself close and curl, as a sunflower does at night, to
protect and shelter. The words dispersed, and the outside sounds came in.
Birdsong, traffic, distant voices.

 
          
“I
have been blessed,” said Liffey to herself, walking carefully and warily home,
eyes inside and misting from time to time. She did not say it to anyone else,
for who would believe her?

 
          
“Richard,
I felt the baby’s spirit arrive. It was the soul that came. I know it was.”

 
          
No.

 
          
“Madge,
Mother, did you know I was pregnant? No? Well, I am, and what’s more, the Holy
Ghost or something descended and now inhabits me.”

 
          
?

 
          
No.

 
          
“Mabs,
friend, you know how I slept with your husband, Tucker—well, you don’t, but I
did, except it isn’t his baby. Well, I just
know,
because the baby’s said so—”

 
          
?

 
          
No.

 
          
“Mr.
and Mrs. Lee-Fox, your daughter-in-law speaking, the flimsy one who trapped
your only son into marriage, the never-quite-accepted, never-to-be-accepted
one, who tried to charm her way into your hearts but failed, who now says just
to have Richard’s child isn’t enough, but has to have an Annunciation instead,
as if Richard was some Middle-Eastern carpenter and she was Mary—”

 
          
?

 
          
No.

 
          
“Bella
and Ray, Liffey speaking. You know, Richard’s wife, your lodger’s wife, who
chose to live in the country and apart from her husband and is now pregnant and
poor but compensating with quasi-religious experiences—”

 
          
p

 
          
No.

 
          
Liffey
made up the fire, and polished the windows to let every scrap of light in, and
settled down to cherish the baby.

 
          
Richard,
told of the loss of Liffey’s
wealth, frittered away on pretty things and useless things and delicious
things, was first irritated, then relieved, and then filled with a great sense
of protectiveness and love for Liffey, as if by her very helplessness she
solicited something from him that she hitherto had not, and moved through the
world with an added weight and dignity, so that presently his colleagues
remarked to one another that Richard had changed.

 
          
“He’s
older than one thinks,” somebody said, and at meetings his voice was listened
to, and not just heard.

 
          
Richard
resolved to give up Miss Martin and Bella, and kept the resolution for a full
week.

 
          
Then
Bella got him drunk on free champagne at a restaurant opening—and if he did
with Bella, then why not with Miss Martin?

 
          
And
Helga was sulking slightly, as if thanks were not sufficient recompense for
her ironing of his shirts and the folding of his socks in the neat Continental
way, not the angry convo- luting inside-way the English had.

 
          
Eight
weeks. The baby’s heart beat strongly now. The inner ears were growing fast,
although they still showed no external part. The face had nostrils and a
recognisable mouth and black pigmentation where the eyes were to be. Elbows,
shoulders, hips and knees were apparent. The spine moved of its own volition
for the first time, although fractionally. The length of the foetus was two
point two centimetres. There was no apparent room within for the soul which
gave grace to its being.

 
          
Mabs,
or so she thought, knew everything there was to know about Liffey. She
certainly knew about Liffey’s new poverty. Liffey used Mabs’s telephone, having
none of her own; and if she wished to be private had to walk a mile to the
public call-box at Poldyke, a manual exchange, where it so happened that the
operator was a friend of Mabs’s. Letters to and from Liffey were left at
Cadbury Farm, for the postman would not walk up the track, and Mabs was not
above steaming open any she thought interesting. Shop-assistant friends gave an
account of what Liffey purchased, and the doctor’s receptionist, also a friend,
passed on details of her health.

 
          
“
She’s having
to learn to live like anyone else,” said Mabs
smugly, observing that Liffey now bought groceries much as anyone else did, and
that her order at the butcher’s was for mince and sausage, no longer fillet
steak and stewing veal. “Her Richard won’t like that!”

 
          
And
it was true that Richard did not like it very much. The euphoria of his
compassion and tenderness faded; difficulties, so bravely anticipated and
overcome in principle, remained in detail to plague and depress him. With the
merest suspicion in the mind that Liffey’s skinny, shabby clothes might be
chosen because they were cheap, she stopped looking chic and looked dowdy
instead. Her cooking—when she was obliged to use inexpensive ingredients and
was deprived of the cream and brandy she liked to add to everything, from soup
to stewed apples—was not as seductive as before. And what Richard had construed
in Liffey as sexual delicacy now seemed rather more like sexual limitation, for
without a doubt what had occurred to Liffey had occurred to Richard too—that
once a wife is financially dependent, she is sexually dependent too. Richard
felt by that token the more in a position to criticise.

 
          
He
cherished
Liffey,
of course he did, but no longer
quite as an equal. He was almost sorry for her; he came down at the weekends
because he ought, not because he wanted to. Nothing was said: the movement in
their relationship was slight, too slight to find voice, but both sensed it.

 
          
Now
he was rich and she was poor.

 
          
Mabs
knew it and she was glad.

 
          
Mabs
knew everything about Liffey except what she could not know—that Liffey’s baby
had spoken to her, settled clear and bright inside her, and promised that everything
would be all right. That Liffey now had powers of her own, that Mabs could no
longer have Nature all her own way, that forces worked for Liffey too and not
just for Mabs. Winter winds were on Mabs’s side, and frost, and lightning and
storms. Liffey loved sun, and breeze, and warmth; and they loved her. And
spring was coming.

 
 
          
Tucker put the cows
on Liffey’s side of
the stream held. One of them was pregnant. It bellowed and groaned one misty
evening. It lay down, it shuddered,
it
jerked its
limbs and arched its neck. It rolled its eyes in a terrifying manner, showing
an expanse of red-veined white. Could any eye on earth be so large? A single
leg, Liffey was horrified to see, stuck out from under its tail. A single leg,
a calf’s leg, in a frozen wave to the world, as if a frame of
a him
had been frozen. Blackish mucus gushed out around it
even as Liffey looked, and with it came a stench strong and disagreeable.
Liffey looked and gasped and ran, crying for Mabs and Tucker.

 
          
Tucker
was out. But Mabs was in the kitchen, watching television. She took a long
time deciding what to do, whether to wait for Tucker or call the vet, and then
finally came herself, pulling on a long pair of rubber gloves. Together they
set off back up the lane. Liffey wanted to go back inside the cottage, but Mabs
wouldn’t let her.

 
          
“Why
don’t you watch? It’s always nice to watch animals being born.”

But it wasn’t. The
calf was dead when Mabs pulled it out by its emergent leg, tugging and
grunting, while the cow lowed and moaned. When the calf’s head came out, it was
putrid— pulpy and liqueous. Then the cow heaved and groaned and

 
          
“Three
hundred pounds down the drain,” said Mabs, furious. “At least she wasn’t a
good milker or it would have been nearer four.”

           
And she left cow and calf lying
there and walked back to the cottage with Liffey. Liffey composed herself as
best she could: she felt sick and wanted to sleep, but Mabs wanted to talk, it
seemed.

 
          
“So
you’re going through with your baby,” Mabs said.

 
          
“Of
course,” said Liffey, surprised.

 
          
“I’d
have thought you’d have waited until you and your Richard are more settled.”

 
          
“Why?”

 
          
Mabs
just shrugged, and Liffey felt, for once, wary, and as if forces she was not
quite in control of were abroad, and dangerous. Supposing what happened to the
calf happened to her baby? She wished she had not seen it.

 
          
Liffey
feared the contagion of ill-fortune, as pregnant women do. Oh, show me no bad
sights,
sing me no harsh songs, let good fairies only
cluster around the baby’s cradle.

 
          
“Nothing
to a termination these days,” said Mabs. “Girls I know have it done in order to
get away on holiday in peace. They don’t mind a bit, up at the hospital. Funny
thing, that cow that just died. Her fourth
calf,
and
still something can go wrong. We mostly lose them first time round. Just like
people. First babies are always the trickiest. Longer labours, that’s what does
it.”

 
          
Liffey
folded her mind around the baby to guard it.

 
          
“I
couldn’t possibly have a termination,” said Liffey.

 
          
Mabs
did not like the firmness of Liffey’s response. Liffey’s baby, she began to
feel, might be harder to get rid of than she had imagined. She felt it more and
more acutely as the sup- planter of her own, product of some process set up by
Tucker and so stolen from her. She despised Liffey for a fool; she despised the
baby for choosing where it had to grow. She smiled warmly at Liffey, dispelling
most of Liffey’s doubts but not all. Liffey, for once, had noticed Mabs’s ill-will.

 
          
“You’d
better get up to the doctor soon,” said Mabs. “You look a little peaky.”

 
          
“I’ll
wait a bit,” said Liffey, and spoke gently, and smiled, as people do when they
sense danger and know better than to aggravate it, and went inside her cottage.

           
Mabs stood, still in bloodied rubber
gloves and thick muddied
Wellingtons
, and stared after her for a little, and then moved off towards Cadbury
Farm.

 
          
The
lane was very, very old. The hedges were so high that in summer they would form
a tunnel of green. Earthworks and barrows stood at the summit of the hill above
the cottage. Here the people of the Bronze Ages had lived and died, worked
their magic and honoured their dead, until the Iron Age invaders had arrived
and driven them out, and lived off a past that was none of their own. Once
messengers had hurried up and down the lane with good news and more often bad,
and mothers at their coming had clutched their children to them, and fathers
wondered how to turn ploughshares into swords, and stood there wondering too
long.

 
          
Liffey
stood in the kitchen and watched Mabs plod away, and wondered why she was
afraid, and realised of course it was the dead calf and the dying cow that had
upset her.
Unreasonable to blame Mabs for what was Nature’s
fault.

 
          
At
about the same time as Liffey witnessed the death of the cow, Richard was
obliged to rescue the Nash’s cat from the gutter, where a passing car had flung
it to die. In the end he could not nerve himself to pick the animal up,
fancying its dead eye was glaring at him, and while he was hesitating, Helga,
with alarming speed, came running out of the house, scooped the remains up into
a plastic bag and dumped them into the dustbin, and got back to her cleaning
as if nothing had happened. Richard was sick.

 
          
Liffey
rang her mother and told her the news.

 
          
“I
suppose you know what you’re doing,” said Madge. “Is it what you want?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
“Why?”
asked Madge
disconcertingly.

 
          
“I
suppose because it’s natural,” said Liffey brightly.

 
          
“So
are varicose veins,” said Madge.

 
          
“It’s
not as if I had a career,” said Liffey tentatively over the crackling line to
her mother far away. “It’s not as if I was good at anything else. I might as
well use up my time having a baby. I might even be a born mother.”

           
“Not if you take after me,” said
Madge, which might almost have counted as an apology. “Aren’t you too
frightened? You know what you’re like about pain.”

 
          
Liffey
realised at that moment that she would never, ever, receive her mother’s
whole-hearted approval. Marks would be given, but marks would always be taken
away. Six out of ten for overcoming cowardice: three out of ten for indulging
her own nature and having a baby: and there she was, with an average of four
and a half out of ten, when a pass-mark to mother’s love was five.

 
          
So we live, as daughters; and as mothers are astonished that we
elicit the same sad anxiety from our progeny.
It was not how we meant it
to be when we dandled them on our knees.

 
          
“So
you’re having a baby in the country,” said Madge, “while Richard works in
London
. Is that wise?”

 
          
“It’s
what has to be,” said Liffey. “Not what I want. As soon as Richard gets Mory
and Helen out of the apartment we’ll be together again.”

 
          
“You
could afford something else,” said Madge. “What’s the matter with you?”

 
          
Liffey
did not want to hear the note of relish in the mother’s voice when she
complained about the money; she put it off.

 
          
“I
like it down here,” said Liffey, and a ray of sun broke through the clouds, and
she knew that it was true. Only that some danger lay across the land like a
sword.

 
          
Madge
hiccuped on the other end of the line, and Liffey wondered if she were drunk
again, and along with the dreary everyday feeling that she had failed to live
up to her mother’s expectation of her, there now travelled another strand,
sharply painful: of anxiety for her mother’s welfare.
The
fear of the child, back from school, whose footstep hesitates at the gate of
the house, wondering what’s to be found within.
Liffey remembered that
too. Her heart beat faster, her hand trembled,
tears
started in her eyes.

 
          
“It’s
all right,” said the baby suddenly and unexpectedly.
“All
that is past.
Be calm, be still.”

 
          
And
Liffey was, and Mabs, listening in on the extension, knowing only what was
available to her to know, wondered why the tone of her voice changed.

           
“Why don’t you come down and stay?”
asked Liffey. “It’s going to be so lovely now spring is coming.”

 
          
“I
was never one for Nature,” said Madge presently, cautiously, “or for family
either. But I suppose it is the kind of thing a mother is expected to do. Once
you’re given a label you never escape it. I’ll come down presently if I can
find the time.”

 
          
Liffey,
to be hung for a sheep as well as a lamb, telephoned Richard’s parents.

 
          
“A
baby!” cried Mrs. Lee-Fox, “how wonderful.” But in her voice Liffey could hear
shock and despair. Now Richard and Liffey were married for good, for ever: they
had joined not as children join, for fun and games, but as man and wife,
together, as parents, to face trouble and hard times. Mrs. Lee- Fox was in
danger of losing her son.

 
          
Liffey
wondered if she had always heard the other voice, the tone that lies behind the
words and betrays them—and if she had heard, why had she not listened? Perhaps
she listened now with the baby’s budding ears? And certainly this disagreeable
acuity of hearing diminished within a week or two, perhaps because Liffey could
not for long endure her new sensitivity to the ifs and buts in Richard's voice
when he assured her he loved her: perhaps because the matter of hearing was,
once properly established, less in the air so far as the baby was concerned.

 
          
Mrs.
Lee-Fox handed Liffey over to Mr. Lee-Fox, who repeated his wife’s enthusiasm,
and the phone, following a misunderstanding as to who was actually to talk to
whom, went down rather abruptly. Liffey did not telephone back.

 
          
Mabs
put down the extension and called Liffey into the kitchen for a cup of tea.

 
          
Later
in the week Mabs sent Tucker up with some new-laid eggs from her hens. Tucker
smiled at Liffey in a friendly and ordinary manner and did not outstay his cup
of tea and biscuit.

 
          
Liffey^
used two of the eggs for breakfast the following day. On the mornings she did
not feel sick she felt extremely hungry, with a kind of devouring,
non-selective hunger, as if already feeling the need to stock up now for hard
times ahead. This was one of the hungry mornings, when she was glad Richard
was not about, to witness her greed.

 
          
The
first egg plopped perfectly out of its shell into the pan, the ball of orange
yolk held firmly in a strong white. The second fell out in a runny, smelly,
thin flow, yolk and white already mingled, leaving the inside of the shell
stained a yellowy green, and spread across the bottom of the pan with
unbelievable speed, so that the first egg was contaminated.

 
          
Liffey’s
heart beat, her hand flew to her mouth. She knew beyond doubt that Mabs had
sent a message of ill-will. Her earlier doubt of Mabs had been transitory, had
been washed away by civility, smiles and cups of tea. And as Richard had
pointed out, to ask a barely pregnant woman to witness the delivery of a dead
calf may be tactless but can hardly be called a conspiracy. And he had laughed,
and Liffey had tried, and managed, to laugh too.