Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (20 page)

 
          
Eleven weeks.
Liffey’s baby had eyes
beneath solid eyelids, a nose and rudimentary hands and feet. It weighed two
grams. It lay safely in a sac of amniotic fluid. It rocked as Liffey walked.

 
          
Liffey
felt that her baby was sufficiently rooted in the world to stand a little
classification and investigation, of a scientific and medical nature, and made
an appointment to see Dr. Southey on his weekly visit to Crossley.

 
          
Mabs
kindly drove Liffey in, but mistook the time of the doctor’s first appointment
and did not wait to check that the surgery was open, so that Liffey had to wait
in the cold and rain for nearly an hour.

 
          
Dr.
Southey, the same young man who had once nearly run Liffey over in a car that
appeared too big for him, was serious, kind and well trained in psychosomatic
medicine.

 
          
When
he reproached Liffey for not having attended earlier she made reply, and he
took her reluctance—How could she say that she had not wanted the baby
frightened away?—as a sign that she was unenthusiastic about her pregnancy. And
the fact that she was cold to the touch reinforced his sense of unease. She was
reluctant to be examined internally, and he suspected that she was neurotic.

 
          
“Why
did you have to do that? What did you discover?” she demanded.

 
          
“That
your dates are about right, that there are no tumours or abnormalities of your
pelvis, no major infections, no ulcers on your cervix, and that the size of the
pelvic cavity and its outlet are reasonable.”

 
          
“You
mean I have minor infections.”

 
          
He
sighed.

 
          
“Giving
information to pregnant women is impossible,” he said. “All I mean is, if you
have minor infections, I cannot detect them.”

 
          
She
looked at him, strong-chinned and mutinous, and he decided that he liked her.
But that she was too thin.

 
          
“I
want all the information you have,” she said. “It’s my body and my baby, and
I’m not a fool.”

 
          
“I
daresay not,” he said, “but that won’t stop you going into a grey depression
because you misunderstand what I say. Better, in my experience, to say nothing.
I took a cervical smear while I was about it.”

 
          
“What
makes you think I have cancer?” she demanded, and he laughed, thinking his
point well made. Presently she smiled too, and after that they got on better.

 
          
He
took blood from a vein.

 
          
“What’s
that for?”

 
          
“To
see if you have syphilis.”

 
          
“Is
it going to be like this all the time? One indignity after another?” she asked
presently, and he replied yes, that having babies was not the most dignified of
processes. It was, he added, the ultimate triumph of the body over the mind.

 
          
“And of desire,” she said, “over common sense.”

 
          
He
thought she meant sexual desire, but she did not. She meant the overwhelming
desire, of which she was now so conscious, to be part of the world about her:
to be a woman like other women; to feel herself part of nature’s process: to
subdue the individual spirit to some greater whole. When now she knelt in the
flower beds and crumbled the earth between her fingers to make a softer bed for
a seedling, she felt she was the servant of Nature’s kingdom and not its
mistress. And what sort of common sense was that?

 
          
He
asked her what she did all day.

 
          
“I
wait for my husband to come home at weekends,” she said. “I wait for the baby
to grow. I garden, I think, I listen to the radio. I walk up to see Mabs, my
friend. Sometimes I’m sick, and then I wait to feel better. I do a lot of
waiting.”

 
          
It
occurred to him that she might have invented the husband, away in
London
; when she had gone he wrote a memo for the
social worker to check.

 
          
Liffey
Lee-Fox, whom everyone had envied, now the object of compassion and concern!
Mabs, hearing about the social worker from Ellen, the doctor’s receptionist,
felt both gratified and annoyed. She asked Richard and Liffey over for Sunday
lunch, and added mistletoe-tansy to Richard’s glass of nettle wine and a
distillation of pure ergot to Liffey’s elderberry. Audrey, the previous
autumn, had searched the heads of rye stalks for the violet-black grains with
their fishy, peculiar odour, where the ergot fungus had attacked the grain. She
had done well, and her grandmother had been able to prepare quite a quantity of
fluid ergot, and told Audrey to tell her mother to use sixty drops if she
wished to abort a baby. Audrey wasn’t listening properly and told Mabs to use six
drops, and the dose had in fact a beneficent effect on Liffey’s system. She was
twelve weeks’ pregnant; her period would in normal times have been due; she was
suffering from a slight hormonal imbalance and on the verge of losing some of
the uterine lining—a process that, once started, can continue until all the
contents of the uterine cavity, baby and all, have been lost. The few drops of
ergot caused the uterus to contract, but mildly, and Liffey’s condition being
marginal, the bleeding stopped. Had her elderberry wine been fractionally more
strongly dosed, the uterine contractions would have been powerful and Liffey
would have miscarried.

 
          
Richard,
his entire system agitated by mistletoe poison, and mistaking his general
restlessness for sexual ardour, wanted to make love to Liffey as soon as they
arrived home, but she refused. Intercourse can be dangerous during pregnancy
at the time of a threatened miscarriage—one contraction, as it
were
, leading to another—although at all other times in
pregnancy it is perfectly safe—an hour before the baby is born, an hour after.

 
          
Liffey
refusing Richard again! It made him angry. He went home on Sunday evening—he
now thought of
London
as home—and went to Bella’s bed, not she to the sofa in the study. Thus
he defied the last of the proprieties. But where was Ray?
At
a discotheque with Karen—with one ear pierced by a silver earring.
Bella
had lost single earrings by the dozen over the decades, and could never bring
herself to throw away the one remaining. Now Ray, following male teenage
fashion, made good use of them.

 
          
Mabs
waited, and waited in vain, for Liffey to come running with news of blood and
disaster. She could not understand it. Mabs looked at another full moon, and at
the Tor, riding the skies beneath it.

 
          
“I
suppose it looks like a woman’s breast,” she said to Tucker. “And the tower on
top is the nipple. Perhaps all those hippies are right, prancing about
mother-naked up there. Do you think so, Tucker?”

 
          
Tucker was not feeling so
frightened of
his wife. Mabs minded about his going with little Liffey, who was anyone’s for
the asking; and being able to make Mabs mind made Tucker powerful.

 
          
Mabs
had noticed the change in Tucker and gone to her mother, who was already
compounding a mixture of belladonna together with the bark and twigs of the
Virginia
Creeper
that grew above Carol’s door, to
ensure Tucker’s fidelity and sobriety. But Tucker was not to know that.

 
          
Carol’s
husband, Barry, was as unaware as Tucker of the changes in his nature brought
about by his wife. It was Carol’s habit to mix foxglove pollen into the egg of
his daily sandwiches, thus sparing
herself
from his
sexual attentions. She herself took an infusion of lignum vitae—a hard and rare
wood much imported from the
West Indies
in the nineteenth century and used for the axles of horse-drawn
vehicles—dissolved in whisky, the better to respond to the advances of Dick
Hubbard. The blacksmith at Poldyke had a few old lignum vitae timbers left, and
in exchange for a kiss and a pinch and the promise of more was happy enough to
let Carol scrape away at the black, hard, heavy wood. He could not see how it
harmed him, let alone benefited her.

 
          
Carol
and Mabs’s mother were now teaching Audrey her skills, and sometimes Mabs wondered
if it was Audrey’s doing that she did not get pregnant in spite of the infusion
of coca that she, Mabs, took daily and that made her sometimes visionary, so
that Glastonbury Tor swam towards her through the sky. Perhaps it was the coca
too that gave her frequent rages— a force that superseded the ordinary rules of
cause and effect and sent her perceptions a little beyond the ordinary,
piercing extra deeply into the crust of reality.

 
          
But coca or not,
visions or not, Mabs
did not become pregnant. Tucker’s sperm swam obediently to meet her monthly
ovum, and fertilised it well enough; the ovum dutifully developed the required
chorionic villi with which to embed itself into the waiting uterine wall, but
then proceeded at too lagardly a pace along the Fallopian tube, arriving in the
cavity of the uterus eight days after fertilisation instead of the required
seven, and by that time had ignobly perished for lack of a suitable foothold,
or villihold.

 
          
It
would require a very special drug to meet such a specific need, and the drug
was not coca.

 
          
Thirteen weeks.
Liffey’s waist
thickened. She had to tug at her jeans to do them up. Her uterus was
distending: the am- niotic sac within measured four inches in diameter and the
foetus was three inches long. The baby’s face was properly formed: its body
curled in an attitude of docility—resting, waiting, listening, growing. What
it most needed now was time, which Liffey, through her love and caution, must
supply.

 
          
Twenty-seven
weeks to go. The most dangerous days were over, for the baby’s organs had
properly formed and no major congenital abnormality had become apparent—nor now
was likely to—which might lead to miscarriage. Although the baby could still of
course be expelled if the mother body for some reason or other rejected it—even
though there was nothing in the baby’s own ordination, as it were, to lead to
this sorry conclusion. But any drugs or infections introduced into the
mother’s body would now have the barrier of the placental wall to cross and
could harm only in extreme circumstances.

 
          
And
there was of course the one great hazard to the baby’s survival, still
undiagnosed by the outside world, in the fact that the baby’s placenta, now
fast forming, had lodged in the uterine wall beneath the foetus instead of to
one side of it. For here the chorionic villi of the fertilised egg had clawed
and stuck, and now, where they had first attached, were developing with vast
speed into the complexity of the placenta, which was linking itself-with
arteries to the foetus, separating the mother’s circulation from the baby’s,
selectively transferring to the baby oxygen, carbohydrates, fatty acids,
proteins, amino acids, vitamins and essential elements, removing excreted products,
carbon dioxide and urea for the mother to dispose of through her own
system—but also, alas, by virtue of its unusual position, blocking the baby’s
eventual path to the outside world.

           
It was as if the fertilised egg, on
its way out of Liffey’s uterus, had grabbed its last chance—clung where it
could and not where it ought.
A lucky, hopeful, still
surviving baby.