Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (22 page)

 
          
Richard
blamed the osteopath.

 
          
Mabs thought
she might be pregnant. Her
period was late. She felt heavy. She brought the children home iced lollies,
and took Eddie to the dentist and let him sit on her knee in the waiting room.

 
          
Then
her period started.

 
          
Storms
clashed and banged around the Tor. Tucker laughed and Mabs’s eyes flashed. Mabs
went out with her mother before dawn and gathered wild arum, cherry laurel and
henbane in the grey light. Or rather, Mabs pointed and her mother picked; Mabs
was bleeding and wasn’t supposed to touch. In any case, old women make better herbalists
than young. Mabs’s mother chanted Hail Marys as she picked.

 
          
“Do
shut up, Mum,” complained Mabs. “That’s the wrong sort of mumbo-jumbo.”

 
          
“It’ll
do,” said Mabs’s mother. She didn’t look like a witch, any more than did her
daughter. She had a round, lined face and open features and wore spectacles
that swept up at the sides in the fashion of thirty years before. She was proud
of her straight stature and good figure, wore tweed skirts and ironed blouses
and went to Keep-Fit classes.

 
          
“And
what are you up to, anyway,” she asked of her daughter, “that the Blessed
Virgin wouldn’t like?”

 
          
Mabs
smiled.

 
          
“Just
putting a few things right, Mum,” she said.

           
“Because if you want to get
pregnant,” said Mabs’s mum, “this is the best way I can think of, of making
sure you’re not. And what do you want more children for? You don’t look after
the one’s you’ve got, and you’re too old anyway. Now stop snivelling or I’m
going straight home back to bed.”

 
          
And
indeed, Mabs stood up to her large knees in the long grass of the graveyard and
snivelled because her mother was being unkind. She might have been anyone’s
daughter.

 
          
Mabs
persuaded Audrey to do the distillation, and added a whole half-glassful to a
bottle of the previous year’s elderberry wine, and gave it to Tucker to take
over to Honeycomb Cottage. Liffey would not be the only one to drink it, but
she was beyond caring.

 
          
The
six or seven drops of the distillation that Liffey swallowed did indeed lower
her blood pressure, but without harming the baby. Her blood pressure, as the
pregnancy advanced and the level of progesterone in her body
diminished,
was returning to normal. She no longer felt so faint or so disinclined to
stand for long in one position as the circulation of blood through her various tissues
proceeded more normally, although the blood vessels were not quite so relaxed
as before. She was, in fact, beginning to feel well. Her complexion was smooth,
her eyes glowed, her hair shone; she moved more lightly, she flung her arms
around Richard; she bubbled and burbled and overflowed; she drank the glass of
elderflower and felt obliging and friendly.

 
          
“How
was she?” Mabs asked Tucker on his return.

 
          
“Looking
better every day,” said Tucker.

 
          
“Country
air, country food, and country wine,” said Mabs.

 
          
But
he did not trust her.

 
          
“Mind
you be nice to her,” Tucker said. “She’s done you no harm.”

 
          
Mabs
was heating up hen food on the stove, and a musty smell filled the kitchen. The
hens were off-lay again, and warm food for a day or two often started them off
again. He came up behind her and ran his hands up her sides.

 
          
“She’s
pregnant and I’m not,” said Mabs, not looking at him. It was a confidence, and
a question, and contained no threat.

           
“It might be,” said Tucker
cautiously, “that you’re your own worst enemy when it comes to that.
Takes a soft and gentle woman to have a baby, not one full of
hate.”

 
          
She
thought he might be right and resolved to try leaving Liffey’s baby alone for a
while. Liffey was mid-pregnancy in any
case,
and the
baby harder to shift now than at any time, and she could always return to the
kill later on (if it did not work.)

 
          
Time
passed. Liffey had to use a safety pin to do up her skirt. She had gained
twelve pounds. She had lost weight, as many women do, in the first three months
of pregnancy, but the change in her diet from expensive protein foods to cheap
carbohydrate bulk had more than compensated. The extra twelve pounds of course
included the weight of the foetus, the placenta and the amniotic fluid, and the
increase in the circulating blood. Liffey could expect through the course of
the pregnancy to add about twenty-eight pounds to her normal weight. Now, at
four and a half months, she had added eight pounds more than Dr. Southey
thought proper, but on the other hand her colour was better, her face less
strained, and the quiet life she led for five days of the week did her more
good than the two weekend days with Richard could do her ill.

 
          
Richard’s
solicitor in the meanwhile wrote three more letters to Mory, which Mory did not
even see, as Helen now destroyed all letters as they came through the
letterbox. The kittens loved playing with paper shreds. Richard’s solicitor,
moreover, was having domestic troubles, his files were in confusion, and
migraine headaches sometimes kept him away from his office for weeks at a
time. He was a friend of Richard’s father, had once known Richard’s mother
well, and felt headaches coming on whenever he stretched out his hand to
Richard’s file, thus considerably delaying Richard’s cause.

 
          
“Everything’s
under control,” he would say whenever Richard rang, or Miss Martin, asking for
news. “These things can’t be hurried. Tenancy disputes always take time.”

 
          
“Is
that what we’re in?” Richard asked, troubled.
“A tenancy
dispute?
I thought they were in illegal possession?”

 
          
“I
know what I’m doing, young man,” said Richard’s solicitor merrily enough, but
with a hint of asperity behind the merriment, putting Richard properly in his
place. And when Liffey asked Richard if he trusted his solicitor, Richard
replied, “I know what I’m doing, Liffey. Tenancy disputes always take time. And
he’s an excellent solicitor. My father swears by him.” So that Liffey in her
turn was put in her place.

 
          
Mory’s
application for a job in
Argentina
went unanswered.

 
          
Miss
Martin’s mother read an article aloud to her daughter over tea. Its title was
“The Sticky Snare of the Married Man,” and Miss Martin was worried enough to
say to Richard, “This can’t go on.”

 
          
“What
can’t go on?” he asked blankly, and she felt at once that she had been
presumptuous, and fell into silence, and was more easily manipulated
afterwards.

 
          
She
did suggest to Jeff, however, in desperation, that if he really wanted it, she
would sleep with him before their marriage. But he said he wanted their
married life to begin properly, and that he valued her purity very much, and
explained what she had not known before, that his mother had been a “wild”
woman and disgraced the family very much, and he was determined to have as a
wife someone who would not repeat that sordid pattern. So she apologised, and
felt even
more guilty
than before, and interpreted
that emotion as a new flux of love for Richard.

 
          
Mabs
sat at the kitchen table and glowered. The room was cold, although outside the
sun shone. The cows went off milk, the hens stopped
laying
again, one of the mangy dogs lay down at the end of his chain and died. Mabs
dragged the body inside the house and wept with pity and frustration mixed. She
laid it upon the kitchen table, considered it, rang up her mother to ask if she
had any use for a dead dog, and her mother said no, but Carol might; and Carol
sent Barry over in the van to fetch it back. Before he came Audrey stole a few
of the coarse hairs from beneath its tail and taped it across Eddie’s ear,
which had started discharging as a result of Mabs’s frequent cuffs.

 
          
Mabs
contemplated the nature of a world that could kill a dog she loved but keep
Liffey’s baby, whom she hated, safe.

 
          
Mabs
decided that being good was no way to become happy, let alone pregnant.

 
          
Madge came to visit Liffey.
She thought
it was expected of her. She came by taxi from the station and fretted at the
extravagance. She thought the thatch was unhygienic and the rooms damp, but
grudgingly admired the view. She said that Liffey should not be pregnant, in as
much as she had no job, no training, and now no likelihood of getting one.

 
          
“Richard
will look after me,” said Liffey.

 
          
“I’m
sure I don’t know where you get it from,” said Madge sourly.

 
          
“Get
what?”

 
          
“Naivety.”

 
          
“It
isn’t naivety. It’s trust and love.”

 
          
“There’s
always Social Security,” said Madge, “when the money runs out, which I suppose
it will soon. Do you keep check?”

 
          
“Of
course,”
lied
Liffey.

 
          
Madge
conceded that Liffey looked well; she advised her not to eat fish, which
contained a great deal of cadmium and other poisons, and asked her if she were
not worried about fall-out from Hunkley Point, a nuclear power station some
twenty miles distant.

 
          
“I
used to worry about that kind of thing,” said Liffey. “Not any more.”

 
          
Mabs
came round with damson wine, which Madge at first refused. Then she accepted,
and sipped the deep red, sticky mixture.

 
          
“It
hasn’t fermented out yet,” said Madge firmly. “It has a bitter edge that will
soften in time.”

 
          
And
she poured her glassful back into the bottle and did the same for Liffey’s.

 
          
“I
see you’re not drinking any yourself,” she said to Mabs.

           
“Doctor’s orders,” said Mabs
vaguely.

 
          
“I
think you’re very foolish to drink that stuff, Liffey,” said Madge when Mabs
had gone. “Goodness knows what it does to the baby.”

 
          
“I’m
afraid you offended her,” said Liffey reproachfully. “She’s my only neighbour
and I’m dependent on her, and she’s very proud of her home-made wine.”

 
          
“I
didn’t like her and I didn’t trust her,” said Madge. “I get girls like her at
school sometimes. Wherever they are, there’s trouble.
Heavy
girls with good legs.
They cheat at exams and steal from cloakrooms, and
if they offer you chocolates, you can be sure they’re stale.”

 
          
But
Liffey took Madge’s advice in the wrong way and felt that her mother, far from
trying to protect her, was attempting to upset and worry her. She did not wish
to be told bad news, only to hear good news. It was a tendency apparent enough
in normal times but emphasised now that she was pregnant. Disaffection made
her bold.

 
          
“Mother,”
said Liffey, startling Madge. “Will you tell me who my father is?” It had been
laid down between them long ago that Liffey did not enquire into the
circumstance of her birth. Enough, Madge’s look had always said, that I had
you, that I introduced you into the world, with considerable difficulty, and
without any great pleasure to myself.

 
          
“It’s
only natural to want to know,” said Liffey into Madge’s silence.

 
          
“It
might be better for you not to,” said Madge, filling Liffey with instant fear
that her father had been monstrous or deformed, or that she was the result of
rape and that her child would inherit criminal tendencies. She had told
Richard, for lack of any other way of accounting for herself, that her father
had been a student friend of her mother’s who had died in an accident shortly
after her, Liffey’s conception: and Richard had amended that part of it to
“shortly after the wedding” for his parent’s ears.

 
          
Lying,
which had once seemed an essential part of Liffey’s life, the
very base, indeed, on which it was founded—though a changing, shifting base,
the consistency of an underfilled bean bag—now seemed inappropriate.
The
baby gave her courage, compounded the reality of her existence. She could not
be wished away or willed away.

 
          
“I
want to know,”
persisted
Liffey, and heard the baby
murmur its approval and leap in delight. She put her hand on her stomach. “The
baby moved,” she said to her mother.
“Moved for the first
time.”

 
          
“I
expect
it’s
indigestion,” said Madge, but Liffey knew
it wasn’t. The flutter came again.

 
          
“He
was an actor,” said Madge. “He assured me he was infertile. He’d had mumps
when he was sixteen. When he made me pregnant he refused to believe it, thought
I was trying to pull a fast one, and wouldn’t have anything to do with you or
me. Mumps in men makes only a very small minority infertile of course—but you
know what men are. They believe what they want to believe and expect you to do
the same.”

 
          
“What
sort of actor was he?”

 
          
“Shakespearean.”

 
          
“Was
he a good actor?”

 
          
“He
certainly thought so. I didn’t. He was the sweet-faced, curly-haired kind.
Heterosexual, but who’d have thought it? He was very charming and very boring.
You know what actors are.”

 
          
“How
old was he?”

 
          
“Twenty-five.”

 
          
It
seemed strange to Liffey to have found a father who was younger than she was.

 
          
“You
didn’t want to get rid of me?”

 
          
“I
did,”
said
Madge brusquely, “but it was illegal and
expensive and dangerous, so I didn’t.”

 
          
“Could
I get in touch with him? If he didn’t want a child, he might want a
grandchild.”

 
          
“I
doubt it very much,” said Madge. “He went to
Canada
to avoid a paternity suit.”

 
          
Madge
left on the Friday afternoon—missing Richard by a few hours.

 
          
“Much
as I’d love to see him,” she lied, “I have a pile of examination papers
waiting. I must get back. And they may have forgotten to feed the cat.”

           
Liffey knew that the minute she was
out of sight she would be out of her mother’s mind: she realised that children
do not forget mothers but that mothers forget children. That Madge had done her
duty by her: had stalwartly taken the consequence of misfortune, had seen them
through, and then put the whole thing from her mind—in the same way as, year
after year, she would put a whole Upper Sixth out of mind, as it passed from
the school into adult life, and out of hers.

 
          
Liffey
waved her mother goodbye and knew that the parting was for ever. They would see
each other again no doubt, but that small part of Madge that had been mother
had been firmly swallowed up by the rest and ceased to be mother.