Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (21 page)

 
          
Richard wrote to Liffey
in the middle
of the fifteenth week.

 
          
It’s
ridiculous,
we really ought to get a telephone. I’ve been
promoted and I can’t even ring you to tell you! £60 extra a month! Of course
tax will take £30, but never mind. When the baby comes, at least we’ll get an
allowance for that. Only another six weeks, when the summer train services
begin, and I’ll come down mid-week as well as weekends.

 
          
Liffey
cried. She had expected that Richard would commute every day once the summer
came. So had he once upon a time. But circumstances changed.

 
          
“I’m
now Junior Product Manager on Beesnees Soup,” wrote Richard in a letter that
was delivered by Audrey and bypassed Mabs:

 
          
It’s
a real challenge: the salinity factor has yet to be solved. It means a certain
amount of travelling to factories, sales conferences and so on, but at least
all in the country. The jet-set life comes later! Darling, I’m afraid I have to
be in
Edinburgh
this weekend, so do look after
yourself
. And please try and make some friends—you keep
yourself much too much on your own. Shall I ask your mother to come down? I
hope you’re seeing something of Mabs and Tucker, they’re real friends to
you—you mustn’t get all funny about them, the way you sometimes do. I’m
enclosing £20 for food and so on. Now be careful and write down what you
spend. You know what you’re like.

 
          
Love,
in haste, Richard

 
          
“Isn’t
Richard coming home this weekend?” asked Mabs that Saturday morning, bringing
round a drop of cider for Richard to try. She and Tucker did not drink cider
themselves, finding it a sour and disagreeable drink, but they knew that
Richard delighted in it, detecting species of apples and vintages as he drank,
with an interest and knowledge that country people seldom displayed.

 
          
“Richard’s
away on business. He’s been promoted. Isn’t that wonderful?”

 
          
“But what about the cider?”
Mabs seemed quite disappointed.

 
          
“I’d
like to try it,” offered Liffey.

 
          
“It
wouldn’t do you any good,” said Mabs, “in your condition.”

 
          
But
Liffey insisted and tasted it there and then, and presently, quite liking it,
drank a glass or two more, and later that night had an uprush of sexual desire
that disconcerted her. Had Tucker put in an appearance, she would have unlocked
the door to him, but Tucker did not: Mabs entwined her long legs around
Tucker’s middle and held him fast.

 
          
While
Richard, in and out of Miss Martin, passed through the wilds of
Cumberland
on the way to
Edinburgh
, Bella and Ray went together to a newly
opened fish restaurant in Fulham.

 
          
“There’s
nothing wrong with what I feel for Karen,” said Ray. “I don’t want you to think
that, Bella. I don’t want to upset you.”

 
          
“The only thing that upsets me,” said Bella, “is your taste.
Why don’t you fuck her and get it over?”

 
          
Bella
rose and left the restaurant, but not before slipping twelve oysters into a
plastic bag.

 
          
“Where
are you taking those?”

 
          
“Home to the children.”

 
          
Bella
forgot to put the oysters in the refrigerator when she got home and left them
on the kitchen table. The cat, an instant replacement for the one run over, ate
them, and was found ill to the point of death the next morning, and had to be
taken by Helga to the vet. It was a journey of two miles, but Bella would not
let Helga take a taxi. She had to walk.

 
          
“The
vet’s bill’s going to be bad enough, let alone a taxi!”

 
          
“Don’t
think I’m going to pay the bloody vet’s bill,” said Ray to Bella, but absently,
without acrimony. Really, he could think of little else than Karen: her long,
somehow unformed legs, her plump, smooth face, still unmarked by woe and
indecision, her little hands, the way she moved about the world, choosing
between one happy option and the next, living by choice and not necessity.

 
          
The
cat died in the carrier bag on the way to the vet. Helga did not cry, but Tony
and Tina did when they heard the news.

 
          
“Supposing
it had been us?” asked Tony. “The oysters were meant for us.”

 
          
Everything
seemed upset that weekend. Routines were altered, and not for the better. That
Saturday night Carol told her husband that she was going over to Mabs’s, and
made him a nice cup of tea before she went. He did not drink the tea, since the
shepherd’s pie she’d made had given him indigestion —the onion was still raw,
the mince lumpy and the flour thickening barely cooked—and as a result did not
fall asleep over Match of the Day. He heard mice nibbling and rustling, and
rang Mabs to ask to speak to Carol, and Tucker answered and said no, Carol
hadn’t been round. Funny, thought Barry, but quite soon Carol came back and
said she hadn’t gone up to Mabs’s after all but had stopped by her mum’s, who
was having trouble with a bee swarm. The fright, or suspicion, or unease, or
whatever it was that had churned round in his heavy, kindly, trusting mind
stirred him strangely, and he paused in the middle of his swift, embarrassed,
usually silent love-making and asked his wife if she loved him.

 
          
“Of
course I do,” she said.

 
          
“Idiot,”
said Mabs to Tucker when she finally got back to bed. “I had to run all the way
down to Hubbard’s office. Haven’t I got enough to do?”

 
          
“I’m
not going to tell lies for anyone,” said Tucker. “Especially not for your
sister, who is a married woman but having it off with Dick Hubbard.”

 
          
“She
fancies him,” said Mabs. “She can’t help herself. And Dick Hubbard’s more use
to us than Barry ever will be. Thank your lucky stars it’s you I fancy,
Tucker.”

 
          
“It’d
better be,” said Tucker, “or I’d knock his bloody head off, whoever he was.
Yours too.”

 
          
He
would have, as well.

 
          
In
other rooms at Cadbury Farm, Mabs’s children slept, uneasily. They were
left-over children, out-grown their usefulness as Mabs’s babies, left to get
on with their lives as best they could. Eddie, of all of them, wouldn’t accept
his fate. He would sidle up to his mother and nuzzle into her crotch, as if
trying to get back in. All it did was disgust her. She disliked him for his
soppy ways, his running nose, his watery eyes and the dull reproach therein.
The others were tougher, or more sensible, and kept their distance and grabbed
the baked beans, and shut their eyes and minds to night-time visions of strange
people who belonged to long ago. There had been a farm on the site when the
Romans came, and uncooperative people there who had to be killed to be quieted,
but still weren’t quiet.

 
          
To
Tucker the children were part of the landscape, like the cows and the farm and
the dogs. He hoped that when the boys grew bigger they would help on the farm.
He did not see how the girls could be much use to him. Cattle were fed a
carefully calculated amount in terms of cost and nourishment, in order to
return a profit in milk and meat yield. Sometimes it cost too much to keep the
animals alive, and then it was best to slaughter. You knew where you were with
animals. But the girls just ate and ate and grew and grew, and what return was
there in that? Some other man would presently have the benefit of them. To
nurture girls seemed to Tucker an absurd philanthropy.

 
          
Mabs
slept. Tucker couldn’t.

 
          
Better,
thought Tucker, Mabs dreaming beside him, to satisfy the pleasure of begetting
via some other man’s purse— Liffey’s body, Richard’s income. Richard was a good
enough man on a fine day in a rich season, but not much use when the cold wind
blew. In the meantime there was something to be learned from Richard—the fresh
wind of new ideas. He could feel them ruffling the surface of his mind. And
such was Tucker’s sense of mastery, via Liffey’s body, Liffey’s baby (which he
had come to assume, if only from Mabs’s attitude, was his), that he could
condescend to Richard secretly—while Richard condescended to him openly. Tucker
thought he would visit Liffey again, before long, so she did not forget.

 
          
Tucker
grew sleepy. He saw the world was composed of virgin ground, of furrows
waiting to be ploughed.
Seed to be dropped, watered,
nourished, then to grow.
That was the wonder of it. Perhaps if Mabs was
to have her baby, visiting Liffey again was not a good idea. Perhaps a man used
his fertility up: burying himself too often in already fertilised ground might
weaken his capacity. Tucker would resist the temptation, which was, after all,
not the temptation of the flesh but the temptation of laughing at Richard—who
spoke well, wrote well, thought well, earned well, dressed well, but could not
look after a wife.

 
          
Tucker
laughed and slept.

 
          
The
sun, rising in the east, sent streams of early light westward and caught the
Tor in brilliance beneath lowering dawn clouds.

 
          
The baby weighed
five ounces and was
six inches long. It had limbs with working joints, and fingers and toes, each
with its completing nail. It was clearly male. It lay curled in its am- niotic
sac, legs crossed, knees up towards its lowered head, which it sheltered with
little arms. Its lifeline, the umbilical cord, curled round from its stomach
and into the nourishing placenta. The baby stirred, and moved, and exercised,
according to its own will and not its mother’s: a little being within a
greater being, grown out of it, and from it, but now itself, no longer part of
the greater whole. It moved, but Liffey could not detect the movements: she
would have to wait another month or so for that.

 
          
It
was time to see the doctor again. Liffey remarked on it to Mabs.

 
          
“You
look healthy enough to me,” said Mabs.

 
          
“They
like you to have a check-up every month,” said Liffey.

 
          
“They
like to claim their various allowances,” said Mabs, “and keep their clinics
open and
their hies
full of forms, and if they’re men
they like peeking up your insides. Is it Dr. Southey you have? Tucker won’t let
me see him. They got him for indecent assault up in
London
. That’s why he’s working down here.”

 
          
The
baby laughed, amused. Liffey heard.

 
          
“And
when you think of that thalidomide business,” said Mabs, “I think it’s best to
keep out of their way.
Those poor little babies with
flippers.
Baby kicking yet?”

 
          
“Not
yet.”

 
          
All
the same, Liffey used the telephone to make the appointment, and Mabs was
annoyed. Liffey was proving more difficult to control than she had thought
possible. The way to bring her back to heel of course would be to send Tucker
down again, but that was now out of the question. Mabs felt hollow and cold in
her insides. She missed the movement of the kicks and shruggings of an unborn
child. Tucker filled her up a little from time to time, but it was not enough.
And if Tucker went to Liffey, ploughed about in those already warm and packed
places, she might find herself trying to kill the baby by killing the mother.
And that she recognised would be wicked. The baby, being Tucker’s, was hers to
kill. Liffey was not.

 
          
Mabs
offered to drive Liffey into the surgery.

 
          
Liffey
declined.

 
          
“The
walk will do me good.”

 
          
“Suit
yourself,” said Mabs, and Liffey felt she had behaved ungraciously. Liffey had
recovered from her earliest uneasiness about Mabs. She now looked to her, as a
pregnant girl will to an older and more experienced woman, for advice, company
and reassurance. She recognised that the advice was often bad and the
reassurance marred by a blunt tactlessness, but she did not doubt Mabs’s good
will.

           
All the same, if she could help it,
she did not travel in Mabs’s car. Mabs’s driving frightened her, and the way
she was jolted over the rutted tracks made her worry for the baby, and there
was something about the car itself that worried her. She thought it was
haunted.

 
          
Cadbury
Farm too was haunted, but in a more positive way. It was suffused with a sense
of activity, both past and present. It had sprung out of the ground two
thousand or so years ago, had fallen down, been raised again, been added to, a
new beam put here, a rotten one replaced there, the generations passing the
while; children born, others dying, genes shifting and sorting all the time
within, languidly, but to a steady, beating, almost cheerful purpose. But the
Pierce’s car had none of this richness. It sopped up the energies of its
occupants—Tucker’s fixed and narrow will, Mabs’s flourishing discontent, the
children’s sly and secretive passions—and all to no purpose except the
eventual disintegration of plastic upholstery and the rusting of metal parts.

 
          
Dr.
Southey thought Liffey looked puffier and heavier than she ought. She seemed
tired and anxious.

 
          
“Wouldn’t
you be better off back in
London
with your husband?”

 
          
“There
are problems about that.”

 
          
“What
sort?”

 
          
“Oh, just practical.
Not matrimonial.” She believed it too.
“Anyway, I love the country.”

 
          
“In what way?”

 
          
“It
makes me feel more important.” She had the capacity to surprise him. He looked
forward to her visits.

 
          
She
lay on the couch, her stomach bare. Her uterus, normally hidden away in the
pelvis, had now risen to a point halfway between her pubic mound and her
umbilicus. His hand felt it out. He thought her dates were correct: the uterus
was at the expected height for sixteen weeks.

 
          
“I
have pains in my side,” she said, “low down.”

 
          
“They’ll
go away.”

 
          
“What
are they?”

 
          
The
pains were caused by the shrinking of the corpus luteum of her ovaries—no
longer required to produce the progesterone that had inhibited the shedding of
the uterus wall during the first months of her pregnancy. The placenta had
taken over the task. It was a sign that all was well, not bad. He said as much.

 
          
“You’re
sure it’s nothing wrong?” she insisted.

 
          
“Of
course it’s not.”

 
          
“I
do worry about it. I’m not used to worrying. I used to leave it to Richard to
do the worrying. He always worried about his parents, if there was nothing
else. Now he seems to have stopped and I’ve started.”

 
          
She
laughed, rather nervous and embarrassed, reminding him of a hen gone broody,
changing its nature from something greedy and silly into something prepared to
die rather than expose its eggs to harm, looking out at the world with a stubborn,
desperate wisdom.
And for what?
To
lead ten fluffy chicks back into the hen coop—and forget them a week or so
later.

 
          
“Is
there any treatment?” Liffey asked.

 
          
“The
passage of time,” he said. “Come and see me next week if you’re still worried.”

 
          
Liffey
went home.

 
          
The
pains went. Others came. Liffeys’ ovaries were enlarged and developed a series
of small cysts, which may have accounted for some of the fleeting pains. Her
vaginal secretions increased; she passed water frequently.

 
          
“Yes,
but why?” She made a special journey to ask him.

 
          
“I
don’t know,” he said impatiently. “These things just happen to pregnant
ladies.”

 
          
He
was busy: he had two patients with terminal cancer. He wished he could keep his
respect for pregnant women. They seemed to him to belong so completely to the
animal kingdom that it was almost strange to hear them talk.

 
          
The
weather turned cold. A wet west wind blew day after day and took the blossom
from the trees.

 
          
Liffey’s
body, which normally contained ten pints of blood, now had some twelve pints
coursing through it, the better to supply her uterus and markedly swelling
breasts, but diluting the concentration of red cells therein. Liffey became
anaemic.

 
          
Mabs
knew Liffey was anaemic, because Carol’s friend worked in the laboratory at
Glastonbury
and did the blood counts. The doctor
prescribed Liffey iron tablets, and she took them, although they gave her
indigestion.

 
          
Mabs
felt that time was working for her. Mabs comforted herself with the thought that
perhaps all she need do was wait, and the baby would leave of its own free
will, and natural justice would be served.

 
          
“Why
are you hiccuping?” Richard asked.

 
          
Sometimes
he worried for Liffey’s health, in case the punishment of the gods was
diverted from him to her. He was having altogether too good a time.

 
          
“It’s
the iron pills. I don’t think I’ll take them any more.”

 
          
“Don’t
be irresponsible, Liffey. You ought to be thinking of the baby, not yourself.”

 
          
Richard
had a few bad weekends after that. His skies clouded over for no apparent
reason. Nothing had changed, of course, except his attitude to them. He was
concerned for Liffey and her baby, and now his concern afflicted him. There
were enough things in the world to worry about, surely, without the gratuitous
addition of another? Parents, job, income, the car, accommodation—worries
heaped in upon him one upon another. Wives, surely, were meant to decrease the
load of anxiety, not increase it with anaemia, with hiccuping and puffy eyes
and the threat of the thing within? Miss Martin implied as much all week.
Hard to throw it off at weekends.

 
          
The
curse of the irrational, moreover, descended upon him. He dug the garden, he
planted peas and beans; he hammered and painted when he meant to do nothing but
rest and relax and compare cider and home-made wines with Tucker. He saw that
the chains of fatherhood were already around him: he was preparing for the
baby. As well be a humble cock-sparrow lurching to and fro, to and fro, straw
in the beak for the nest, exhausted, bored and foolish, helpless in the face of
his nature. Richard pulled a muscle in his back, and blamed Liffey.

 
          
Bella
sent him to an osteopath, who made it better, and the next Friday, Richard
returned to Honeycomb Cottage with a car loaded with food and drink, and was
loving and kind and considerate.

 
          
“We
can’t go on living like this,” he said. “We don’t see nearly enough of each
other. But, oh, Liffey,
London
is such a terrible place.” And he reeled off tales of vandalism and
violence: a colleague’s wife mugged on her way home; someone’s daughter’s
friend raped; someone else’s apartment burgled. Lead pollution in the air; the
pale faces of children; the grey look of the elderly.

 
          
Liffey’s words, once upon a time.
Now
Richard’s.

 
          
Mabs
and Tucker came over for a drink. Richard sat with his arm round Liffey, and
Liffey, blooming in his new-found protection, wore a smock and looked really
pregnant.

 
          
“You
are looking well,” said Mabs. “How’s the anaemia?”

 
          
“Much
better,” said Liffey.

 
          
“Wonderful,”
said Mabs. “It’s the elderberry
wine’s
done that.”

 
          
Mabs
gave Richard a bottle of nettle wine to take back to
London
.

 
          
“Give
some to your secretary,” said Mabs. “Perhaps it will sweeten her.”

 
          
“Take
more than drink to sweeten Miss Martin,” said Richard automatically.

 
          
Richard
kept his second appointment with the osteopath, and the back pain returned. He
decided to spend the next weekend in
London
. Ray had gone off to
Brussels
on a free fish-tasting excursion for two,
but taking Karen with him instead of Bella, who had a dentist’s appointment
she couldn’t miss. Bella was left at home angry, which meant sexually
extremely active: and Miss Martin’s Jeff was also away for the weekend, at an
Encounter Therapy course, which meant that Miss Martin was free all Friday
night, and her mother staying with relatives, so there was an empty house
available for their love-making. Richard told Bella that he was with Liffey on
Friday night, Miss Martin that he was with Liffey on Saturday night, and Liffey
that he was at a weekend conference on permitted saline additives.
Unfortunately, as often happened when he stayed away from home, his potency was
unaccountably diminished, and both Miss Martin and Bella were disappointed.
Moreover, Miss Martin had looked forward to making him a proper English
breakfast, with bacon, eggs and sausages, and not the bread and jam and coffee
with which Bella and Liffey apparently fobbed him off—but Richard only toyed
with the plateful, and left the sausage
altogether,
and she felt he found her home rather ordinary and suburban. But of course he
had hurt his back, and that clearly affected his enthusiasms —sexual, culinary
and aesthetic.