Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (24 page)

 
          
“Only honey and rosemary.
I take it every morning.”

 
          
“Then
don’t,” he said, and added on impulse, “You’re not still being sick?”

 
          
“Yes,
quite a lot. Isn’t that normal? You said not to worry about it, just to put up
with it.”

 
          
“For
God’s sake, woman,” he shouted, “where’s your common sense?”

 
          
Where
indeed?
Out the window, along with independent judgment.
The pregnant woman leans upon her advisor, no longer thinks for herself. He had
heard it often enough at the ante-natal clinic. “I feel like a cabbage, I look
like a cow.”
Large-bellied women sitting in their stolid
rows, legs apart for comfort’s sake.

 
          
Liffey
looked quite startled.

 
          
“I
meant not to worry for the first three months,” he said more gently, relieved
to have discovered the cause of her trouble. He prescribed some tablets, and
Liffey fetched them from the chemist—as Mabs discovered from her friend the
girl in the dispensary, but too late to do any switching—but in fact did not
take them, memories of thalidomide in her mind. But she did stop taking Mabs’s
tonic and instantly felt better and stopped vomiting. But she did not make a
connection between the two events.

           
Dr. Southey assumed that the
cessation of vomiting was due to the anti-histamine drug he had prescribed.

 
          
Mabs
watched Liffey grow plump and bloom again. She burned the bottoms of saucepans
out and slammed doors and hit Eddie and shook her fist at the sky, which
provided a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder but little more.

 
          
Glastonbury
Tor looked black from a distance, like a coconut cake covered by flies. It
swarmed with tourists and hippies and little knots of people trying to focus
cosmic energies down from the skies with one device or another. It was a shoddy
place this time of year, Mabs felt, its powers divided amongst too many
purposeless people, covered with litter. She felt displaced. Liffey, on the
other hand, felt merry and bright and companionable and more like other
people. Ramblers came past the door, and mushroom
hunters,
and Mrs. Wild called again, and Audrey would come up and talk, and sometimes
Eddie would just come and stand and stare.

 
          
“I
hope you’re taking your tonic,” Mabs said to Liffey.

 
          
“Oh
yes,”
lied
Liffey, to save embarrassment and trouble.

 
          
So
she had lied to her mother when asked if she had brushed her teeth or done her
homework. She had not quite given up lying, for it is a hard habit to break. It
was to her advantage, now as then: she lied convincingly, and Mabs believed
her, as had Madge before her.

 
          
The baby was unharmed
by the general
depletion of Liffey’s energies. The placenta took priority over the normal demands
of Liffey’s system. Liffey, as she vomited, suffered from lack of calcium,
vitamins, proteins, fats and carbohydrates— but the baby did not. Liffey’s fat
deposits were broken down, as necessary, to provide what was needed.

 
 
          
Liffey
was now seven months’ pregnant. Her heart was enlarged. Its workload had
increased by some 40 per
cent,
it beat at a rate of 70
a minute—9 more than was its custom before she was pregnant. Her heart was,
little by little, pushed further up her chest by her enlarging uterus. All this
was normal, if extraordinary and uncomfortable. Liffey’s lungs too were working
at considerable disadvantage, being pushed into a smaller and smaller area
within her chest: her ribs
were having
to spread
sidewise to accommodate them. She took large breaths from time to time: she was
comfortable only on high chairs, sitting straight. If she slumped, she felt she
could hardly breathe at all. She started piling up the pillows behind her at
night. Just as well, perhaps, that Richard was with her now only on Saturday
nights. He pleaded pressure of work on Friday evenings, and on Saturday took
the early-morning train to the
country,
and the one
back to
London
on Sunday night. The local station was open
again now, and had been for some months, but the notion of Richard being a
daily commuter had long been abandoned.

 
          
He
made love to Liffey reverentially, and she wished he would not. She had
developed, through her pregnancy, a marked interest in sexual matters, and a
desire for sexual experiment, and an almost seedy interest in pornography, as
if her body was anxious to keep her in practice and her genitals lubricated.
She did not understand it, and did not like it, finding herself searching
through drawers for the sex magazines Mabs used to wrap her offerings of this
and that, and which she had meant to burn but never got round to. She told no
one, feeling ashamed. And as Richard seemed shocked if she wanted to change her
position from that gentle one of nesting spoons, which was the most sedate her
pregnant shape would allow, Richard felt uneasy and embarrassed. Sex with
Liffey, for Richard, was an expression of affection and a mark of dedication,
not of need fulfilled, or passion gratified, or desires sated.

 
          
Liffey
suffered now from vague aches and pains. Her ligaments, in particular those in
her pelvis, became softer and liable to overstretch. A group of moles on her
forearm enlarged. The hair on her legs was so dark and so obvious that she took
to shaving her legs with Richard’s razor. Her skin became rather dry, and she
itched and scratched a good deal. The veins in her legs, now slightly varicose,
irritated her. Her vulva did too, for the same reason. She developed thrush and
painful little ulcers as a result, but they responded at once to fungicidal
pessaries prescribed by the doctor.

 
          
“Thrush!”
she cried in horror. “But I’m so careful to be clean.”

           
He explained that the thrush fungus
flies through the air and that there is nothing it likes more than a warm,
moist, pregnant vagina. Liffey, he said, was lucky not to have developed piles,
or they would be irritating too.

 
          
In
the city the streets baked, drivers and pedestrians alike were bad-tempered,
dog turds withered where they lay, sightseeing buses held up the traffic,
exhaust fumes hung about the unhurried air, and were breathed in by the foreign
visitors, who sat outside cafes at makeshift tables, holding up the city’s flow
of business.

           
Mory and Helen kept the windows wide
open. The electricity supply had been cut off, so there was no refrigerator and
the butter melted before it could reach the bread: they had no money for the
launderette—or rather, none they were prepared to -waste on it—and dirty
clothes lay in heaps upon the floors. Helen would not wash by hand, and Mory
could not. They seldom left the apartment together, fearing that if they did,
someone would nip in when they were away and bar the door against their
re-entry. For these misfortunes they blamed Liffey.

 
          
On
one of these hot days Helen recognised the writing on an envelope, and saw that
it was addressed to her, and refrained from destroying it and opened it. It was
from her younger sister Lally, accusing her of murdering Lally’s baby.

 
          
You
always hated me [wrote Lally] because I was so much prettier and brighter than
you, and could walk and talk before you although I was ten months younger. And
then you married Mory and thought you were one up because you were married
before me, but then I got pregnant without even bothering to marry, so you had
to have your revenge. I know all this because I am in treatment with a
wonderful man who has explained it all to me.

 
          
Helen
screamed and cried and grew purple, and Mory thought she would choke.

 
          
“We
can’t live like this,” he moaned. “What’s gone wrong with our lives?”

 
          
Helen
took a whole lot of sleepers and when she woke said, “It’s this place.
Everything’s gone wrong since we came here. We’ve got to get out.”

 
          
“How?”
asked Mory.

 
          
“Write
to Richard,” said Helen, “and say we’ll get out if he gives us a thousand
pounds to find somewhere else. Then we can have a
holiday,
get to the sun and out of this dump.”

 
          
Richard
received the demand and telephoned his solicitor, who was not there.

 
          
“You
can’t respond to threat and blackmail,” said Miss Martin righteously.

 
          
“You
haven’t got a thousand pounds,” Bella sneered.

 
          
“Your
wife would suffer if you moved her now,” Helga pointed out. On those rare
evenings when both Bella and Ray were out together Richard now joined Helga in
her little attic room. He had been right about the exacting nature of her
sexuality: he interpreted her neglect of his washing as a reproof, concluding
that he failed her in some way. Indeed, he was
so
nervous of discovery by Bella as to be unduly hasty in his performance with
Helga.

 
          
Richard
thought that Miss Martin, Bella and Helga judged the situation rightly and said
nothing to Liffey about Mory’s offer. Pregnant women, he knew, should be spared
undue worry. He had looked through the letterbox, in any case, on one or two
occasions and had seen the filth within, and wished Liffey to be spared the
sight.

 
          
Richard
felt inadequate in his dealings with Mory and Helen. He had been emasculated by
the law; his instinct was to break down the door and snap Mory’s neck and throw
Helen down the stairs and regain both his territory and his pride, but these
things were illegal and uncivilised. Nor could he find the courage to hurt his
family’s feelings by changing his solicitor. Frustrated in his masculinity in
these respects, he felt obliged to reassert it by taking Miss Martin, Bella and
Helga to bed. And inasmuch as it was Liffey’s doing that Mory and Helen
featured in his life at all, accounted her responsible for its general current
unquietness.

 
          
He
found his weekends at home increasingly unsatisfactory. Liffey was not
so
active about the house as she had been. There were dead
spiders in his toothmug, and she put food on the table in saucepans instead of
dishing up properly. And there were no napkins. He had become accustomed to
napkins in the restaurants he frequented. But in his heart he knew that the
trouble lay not in Liffey but in his own guilt. He would find fault with her in
order to justify his conduct, and the worse his conduct was the more he would
diminish her. Liffey fails me in this respect and that, therefore it is only
reasonable for me to find consolation elsewhere.

 
          
He
could not look her in the eye. He would rather be in
London
, compounding his offences, than face her
trust.

 
          
Ray
made matters worse by confiding in him.

 
          
“What
am I going to do about Bella,” asked Ray, “now that 1
have
Karen? It isn’t just the infatuation of a middle-aged man for a young girl—it
is more like an appointment made by destiny. Of course I’ll wait. She’s only
sixteen. 1 shan’t sleep with her until she’s nineteen. It wouldn’t be right.
And then of course we’ll be married. But that’s three years pretending to feel
husbandly towards Bella when I’m waiting to marry someone else.”

 
          
“So
long,” said Richard cautiously, “as Karen feels the same in three years’ time.”

           
“Karen’s one of nature’s innocents,”
said Ray with confidence. “I wouldn’t dream of presenting her with my feelings
—she would be shocked and alarmed. But I just catch her looking at me
sometimes—those pure green almond eyes beneath the long red hair—and I
know,
and she
knows,
and she’ll wait for me—”

 
          
“Of
course Bella might find someone else.”

 
          
Ray
looked startled.

 
          
“I
hardly think so,” he said. “She’s far too long in the tooth for that. Besides,
I trust her implicitly. It’s just one of nature’s cruel tricks—to keep a man
attractive long after a woman is past it.”

 
          
“Quite
so,” said Richard.