Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (23 page)

 
          
Eighteen weeks.
The doctor laid a
stethoscope to Liffey’s swelling abdomen, and she heard the beat of her baby’s
heart —160 a minute.

 
          
Liffey,
listening, wore on her face an expression of satisfaction, gratification and
calm.

 
          
“What
are you so pleased about?” asked the doctor. “Anyone would think it was your
doing. All you have to do is just exist. The baby uses you to grow. You don’t
grow it.”

 
          
Liffey
knew better. She hugged her baby in her heart. Ah,
we:
we have done it. We are doing it. It is all going to be all
right. Listen to the heart: there it
is,
the pulsing
of the Universe. It never stops. It is available to those who listen.

 
          
“I
felt the baby move,” she said.

 
          
“Indigestion,”
he said. “It’s too early.”

 
          
Richard
brought his washing home every weekend. Bella had told Helga not to do it any
more.

 
          
“Liffey
has nothing better to do,”
said
Bella, “and you have,
Helga.”

           
Bella’s jealousy was spreading,
ripples from the central pool of her feelings towards Karen. She did not mind
Helga’s eyes so often upon Richard but objected to Richard’s upon Helga.

 
          
“Women
are so wonderful, so extraordinary,” Richard would keep saying.
“All so different.”

 
          
“We
are half the human race,” snapped Bella, but he failed to get her point, and
she ruthlessly sorted through the washing baskets and hauled out all Richard’s
underpants and sweaters and vests and shirts and socks and jeans and shoved
them in a pillowcase and sent them back to Liffey.

 
          
Liffey
washed them lovingly, treated them with softener, dried them in the wind and
sun, and ironed them and folded them; and presently Miss Martin, Bella and
Helga were all to admire her handiwork. Miss Martin the whiteness of his shirt
as he divested it, Bella the softness of a sock, and Helga the smoothness of
vest.

 
          
Liffey
looked in the mirror and was surprised. She was darker than she remembered. The
increased pigmentation that accompanies pregnancy was more noticeable in her
than it would have been in a fairer person. Freckles, moles, nipples all became
darker; and the hair on her legs, usually so light as not to need removing, had
become darker and more plentiful. Liffey noticed it with alarm as she took off
Richard’s safety-pinned jeans and lay on the doctor’s couch, knees up, legs
apart, at the twentieth week.

 
          
He
put on a fine rubber glove to perform the examination, and did it, as before,
with a cool professionalism that belied any notion that it might count as a sexual
assault.

 
          
“Do
you have to do this again?” Liffey asked the doctor, and he replied, “Yes,
mid-term.” But offered no further
information,
and
she did not ask. She had accepted his part in her pregnancy—the father’s part.

 
          
Ellen,
the doctor’s receptionist, let slip to Mabs how well Liffey was doing. The
next day Mabs brought Liffey round a tonic, made, she said, with honey and
rosemary, but containing also dried mushroom powder, which she did not mention.
Liffey took a tablespoon every morning.

 
          
Twenty
weeks. The baby moved
,
there could be no doubt of it.
A pattering, pittering feeling, like the movement of butterfly wings.
Extraordinary.
She walked all the way to Poldyke to
tell Dr. Southey.

 
          
But
listen, doctor, we have the whole world here inside!

 
          
Liffey
told him too that her mouth felt oddly dry. That he could not explain, nor did
he understand it. Her haemoglobin count was high, yet she complained of
listlessness, and she was pale, and her eyes were dull. The doctor sent the
health visitor up to visit Liffey. Mrs. Wild, a competent lady in her middle
years, reported a quiet, clean, orderly household. No, there wasn’t much food
in the cupboards, but, then, it was a long way from the shops. The husband
worked away, but, then, so do many in rural districts. He came home at the
weekends.
Most weekends.
The garden was beautifully
tended. No phone, but neighbours were close at hand.
Nothing
to worry about.

 
          
The
doctor worried about her all the same. He would have asked her over to supper
at home, but Liffey had no transport, and he could not find time to collect and
deliver her himself, and his wife could not drive. Besides, where would it end?
The world was full of listless young women. He did not have the strength to
give them all the kiss of life. Nevertheless he did what he could for her. He
persisted: he asked Mrs. Wild who the neighbours were.

 
          
“Tucker
and Mabs Pierce,” said Mrs. Wild.

 
          
“Eddie’s mother?”

 
          
“Eddie’s
just accident prone,” said Mrs. Wild defensively.

 
          
He
did not comment. He studied Liffey’s card.

 
          
“I
know what it is,” he said, laughing. “She’s overlooked. Mabs Pierce is one of
the Tree sisters.”

 
          
Tales
of old Mrs. Tree filtered through to the surgery. She was reputed to have dosed
her husband to death with a cure for rheumatism, to have made horses limp and
hens go off-lay. A woman whose son had jilted Carol had lost her hand in a food
press the day after news got out—crushed to a pulp, and injuries by crushing
were, as everyone knew, witches’ doing.

 
          
“Because
the mother’s a witch doesn’t make the daughter one too,” said Mrs. Wild, who
had been born in Poldyke, although trained elsewhere.

 
          
“I
hope you don’t believe in witches,” said the doctor, surprised.

           
“Of course not,” she said, saving
herself.

 
          
“Just
as well,” he said, “or they might have power over you. Those who don’t believe
in them can’t be harmed by them, and Liffey Lee-Fox is not the kind to believe
in witches. So let’s rule out overlooking and find another reason why someone
with a high haemoglobin count—up in the mid-eighties—should be pallid and
listless.”

 
          
“Marital
troubles,” said Mrs. Wild.

 
          
“Quite
so,” said Dr. Southey.

 
          
He
asked Liffey to come to the surgery every week instead of every two weeks: the
two-week arrangement was a measure of vague unease about her, the one-week of
something nearing anxiety. A visit a month is the normal arrangement in
midpregnancy.

 
          
“He
must be worried!” said Mabs when Liffey told her. “And you’re not looking very
well. I hope you’re taking your tonic?”

 
          
“Oh
yes,” said Liffey.

 
          
“Well,
make sure you do.
It’s
honey and rosemary. Best thing
in the world if you’re poorly.”

 
          
“It
certainly tastes delicious,” said Liffey, and it did.

 
          
Tucker
noticed the change in Liffey. He was angry with Mabs. He defied her.

 
          
“You
stop doing whatever you’re doing to her,” he said. “Just stop doing it. What’s
bad for one is bad for all.”

 
          
“She’s
taken what’s mine,” said Mabs.

 
          
“That’s
where you’re wrong,” he said. “There’s always more than enough to go round.”

 
          
“But
there isn’t,” said Mabs. “How can there be? If one has it, another one hasn’t.”

 
          
It
was a deep doctrinal point, a profound rift. Tucker had a vision of continual
creation, streaming outward: Mabs of a fixed-state Universe, of strictly
limited riches. Her children felt it, dividing up the fixed and miserly amount
of her love, and starving.

 
          
“Anyway,”
said Mabs, “what makes you think it’s me who’s harming her? More like the
doctor’s poisoning her with his iron pills. I know of a child who died, taking
them out of his mother’s bag and thinking they were sweets. If they’ll kill a child,
they can’t be good for the mother. Someone should tell her.”

 
          
Tucker
took Mabs, all dressed up, to the Farmers’ Ball. She wore real sapphires and a
green silk dress, and they went in the new Rover they kept in the barn for
special occasions. They had bought it with the help of a government grant for
the purchase of farm machinery. He wore a suit and a tie. Dressed up, they
looked quite ordinary, almost negligible. But they were pleased with themselves
and took the Rover down the track to show themselves off to Liffey.

 
          
Liffey
looked pathetic and wan, standing on the path outside Honeycomb Cottage,
waving. The garden, beyond Liffey’s energy now to control, was overgrown and
tangled, and the evening light sombre. Liffey herself was too fat in parts and
too thin in others. Mabs, secure in green silk, thought she could afford to be
kind.

 
          
Tucker
put it to her another way.

 
          
“If
you want to get pregnant,” he said, “you’ll have to do as I say. A man has to
be boss in his own house. Look around you.”

 
          
And
looking round, Mabs saw the force of his argument, saw, as he did, a natural
order in the world about her, of male dominance and female receptivity: saw the
behaviour of hens around the cockerel, the cow submissive before the bull, the
bitch accepting the dog, the little female cats yowling for the tom.

 
          
Mabs
even contemplated leaving the mushroom powder out of Liffey’s tonic, but she
talked the matter over with Carol, who snorted and said, “What are you talking
about, Mabs? People aren’t animals. Tucker talks like that because it suits
him, not because it’s true.”

 
          
Richard
said to Bella, “Liffey’s looking awfully ill.”

 
          
Bella
said, “I don’t want to hear about your wife, Richard.”

 
          
Richard
rang up Mr. Collins, his solicitor, in the hope that there would be news of the
apartment and the routing of Mory and Helen, but only an answering machine
replied, taking a message and promising a return call. No return call was made.

 
          
“You
don’t really want your wife to come back to
London
,” said Miss Martin sadly. “You’re having
the best of both worlds, the way things are.” That was, according to her
mother’s magazines, the way men were, and she believed them.

 
          
And
even while Richard worried for Liffey, Richard knew that what Miss Martin said
was true. His duty lay towards Liffey, but no longer his inclination. And what
was a man to do about that?

 
          
Liffey,
on her next visit to the surgery, accepted a lift in Mabs’s car. She did not
think she had the strength to walk. The rutted path was baked in the sun, and
the car jolted and jerked fiercely.

 
          
Dr.
Southey looked quite shocked when she came into his surgery.

 
          
“You’re
taking your vitamin supplement?”

 
          
“Yes.
And Mabs next door makes me up a tonic.”

 
          
“What’s
in it?”