Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (11 page)

 
          
Bella
had said that having a baby might be the making of Liffey. Responsibility might
mature her.

 
          
“The
Turkish Delight tasted peculiar,” said Liffey. “Why would a woman like Mabs
make Turkish Delight?”

 
          
Richard
discovered that he was critical of his wife, that he jeered inwardly at her
absurdities and felt the desire to mock what had once entranced him. He blamed
Liffey for the loss of his love for her. Richard had been to bed with Bella.

 
          
Mabs stared at the moon.
The moon
stared at Mabs. Tucker couldn’t sleep.

 
          
Other
people looked at the moon.

 
          
In
Liffey and Richard’s former apartment Mory lay in bed in the moonlight while
Helen tweezed hairs from her chin. He had a sharp, pale face and a straggly
beard that jutted above the bedclothes.

 
          
“No
need to get uptight about anything,” said Helen comfortingly. She was plump,
pretty, dark and hairy. She was a free-lance TV set designer, usually out of
work. “Liffey has money to burn. They can afford to live anywhere. We certainly
can’t.” -

 
          
“I’m
really hung up about Richard,” said Mory. “I can feel my ulcer again. What sort
of friend is he, writing solicitors’ letters when he could just as well phone?”

 
          
“And
there’s Lally to think about,” said Helen.

 
          
Lally,
Helen’s sister, out-of-work model and eight months’ pregnant, lay on foam
rubber in the room next door in the arms of Roy, out-of-work builder. If they
married, her Social Security payments would cease. She was cold. She tossed and
turned in the moonlight and presently decided the warmth was not worth the
discomfort and told him to get the hell out of her bed and build a fire. “What
with?” he asked.

 
          
“With
that,” she said and pointed at a Japanese bamboo screen of Liffey’s and a
little wickerwork stool. “People before things,” she said.

 
          
“He’s
got it all ways,” observed Mrs. Martin, Richard’s secretary’s mother. She was
a plump, busy little body, with a husband two years dead. She was ashamed of
her widowhood, as if in letting her husband die she had committed a criminal offence—a
feeling that the neighbours up and down the suburban street reinforced by
ceasing to call where once they had called, or even going so far as to cross
the road when she approached. That they might have acted thus from embarrassment
or from a primitive fear that misfortune might be catching, and so could hardly
be any more responsible for their reactions than she was for her husband’s
death, Mrs. Martin failed to appreciate. She kept herself to herself, and
studiously read the more profound of the women’s magazines, scanning the pages
for truth and understanding about wifehood, mistresshood, motherhood, never
quite knowing what she was looking for but feeling sure that one day she would
find it; in the meantime she passed on to her daughter what she found about the
ways of the world.

 
          
“He’s
got it all ways,” she said now.
“Bachelor life all week and
country cottage at the weekends.
Trust a man.”

 
          
“Oh
no,” said Miss Martin. “It wasn’t his idea, it was her idea.”

 
          
“He’ll
be after you next,” said Mrs. Martin, “in that case. You be careful. Men always
cheat on women who organise their lives.”

 
          
“I’m
not the type,” said Miss Martin, wishing she were. She felt cheated by life,
which had taken away her father and turned her mother into someone whose advice
was based on reading, not on experience. Mrs. Martin thought it unwise of her
daughter not to sleep with her fiance, Jeff; but Miss Martin knew well enough
that the only reason so handsome and eligible a young man as Jeff wanted to
marry her was that all the other girls did and she didn’t. He was a Catholic
and divided women, in the old-fashioned way, into good and bad. The good ones,
Virgin Marys all, who had a man’s babies by as near to an immaculate conception
as everyone could manage, and the bad ones, whom you loved, humiliated and
left. Miss Martin saw all this quite clearly and still wanted to marry Jeff.
Mrs. Martin also saw it clearly and didn’t want her daughter to marry Jeff: her
advice was directed, if unconsciously, to this end.

 
          
Their
little white cat yowled to be let out. Miss Martin opened the back door and it
darted out between her solid legs.

 
          
“Why
should Mr. Lee-Fox choose me?” she asked.

 
          
“Because
you’re there,” said her mother. “All a man needs is for a woman to be there.”

 
          
Miss
Martin’s boyfriend, Jeff, was on the Embankment doling out soup to vagrants and
alcoholics. Once a week he did voluntary social work. “There but for the grace
of God,” he’d say. He took girlie magazines in his briefcase to read in the
early hours when the flow of mendicants and suppliants dried up. Tonight the
moon was so bright that he did not need his torch, and a shimmering mystery was
added to an otherwise brutal reality, and he was glad. He put his trust in Miss
Martin’s virginity to cure him, in some magic way, of his unseemly lusts.

 
          
Bella
and Ray lay far apart in their big double bed. Bella thought of the love of her
life, who had been married for five years to someone else, and Ray thought of
his hopeless love for Karen, schoolgirl. Bella and Ray held hands across the
gulf that separated them, and felt better.

 
          
“Helga
fancies Richard,” said Bella with satisfaction. Bella lived in fear of losing
Helga, for if Helga went, so would her own freedom from domestic and maternal
duties. Au-pairs were becoming hard to find and harder still to control. They
demanded nights out, and lovers in their beds, and exorbitant wages. Helga had
been showing signs of restlessness. A romantic interest in the house, in the
form of Richard, would do much to keep her quiet and docile.

 
          
“So
long as you don’t,” said Ray, more out of marital politeness than any real
anxiety.

           
“Of course I don’t,” said Bella.
“He’s much too simple for me.”

 
          
The
moon, shining through the Georgian window, making shadow bars across the bed,
made her think she was in prison, which in turn made her feel she could yet be
free.

 
          
Helga,
indifferent to a foreign moon, slept soundly in her boxroom. She worked hard,
too hard: she was always tired. She was a warm, rounded, sleepy little thing,
with busy hands, for ever cleaning and wiping and tidying. Sometimes she
thought she would look for a new job with less work, but there was never time.
And if she went home, who would look after the children? They needed her. Those
who respond to others’ needs live hard lives and go unrewarded. She knew it but
could do nothing about it.

 
          
Mabs’s
sister Carol, allegedly spending the night at Cadbury Farm, was in the back of
Dick Hubbard’s car. Later they would go to his office in the market square,
letting themselves in when the pubs had closed and there was, they wrongly
believed, no one about to see. While they waited they indulged the passion that
obsessed them both. It was true, the whole village agreed, that he was a better
partner for her than her husband Barry, but she had made her choice, and the
village said she should stick to it. Carol was lean and dark as Mabs was broad
and pale. Her limbs were silvery in the moonlight, smooth and slippery as a
fish seen under water.

 
          
Dick
Hubbard was worried because he had let Honeycomb Cottage when he should have
sold and had allowed short-time interest to stand in the way of long-term
benefit. He had recognised long ago that to act in this way was to doom
himself
to financial mediocrity. But still he let it happen.

 
          
“She
bought a Rotovator,” he complained now to Carol.

 
          
“She’ll
soon get tired of it,” said Carol comfortingly, “and the weeds will be back.”

 
          
“She
was even asking round for a builder.”

 
          
“Then
have a word with the builder. You can pay a builder a fortune and the chimney
will still come through the roof. What’s the matter with you, Dick? Where’s
your spirit?”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” he said. “The energy seems to have left my brain and gone down
between my legs. I suppose that’s how you like it.”

           
“I’ll supply enough brain for both
of us,” said Carol. “You just supply the other.”

 
          
Mr.
and Mrs. Lee-Fox lay under the moon and worried about Richard. He was their
only son.

 
          
“Perhaps
I brought him up wrong,” said Mrs. Lee-Fox.

 
          
“You
did the best you could. Every mother does.”

 
          
It
was their normal way of speaking—she agitating, he comforting. Now, in the
middle of the night, it came like automatic speech.

 
          
“He
should never have married her.”

 
          
“She’s
a nice, bright girl.
His choice.”

 
          
“We’ll
never have grandchildren.”

 
          
“Give
them time.”

 
          
“Our lovely apartment.
And they’ve let the squatters in!”
“The law will get them out.”

           
“All our savings went to get him
started.”

 
          
“And
he is started,” said Mr. Lee-Fox. “That’s the way life goes. As his starts,
ours closes in. We’re left with the pickings of his takings. Once it was the
other way around. You did it to your parents, I did it to mine. Now it’s our
turn.”

 
          
“I
don’t want it to be,” she said, as if he, like Superman, could turn the world
the other way, but he just grunted and fell asleep. The moonlight cratered her
skin as if it were the moon’s surface, so she looked fifty years older than the
modest fifty-three she was.

 
          
As
for Liffey, the gripes in her stomach became worse. She spent the night
groaning on the sofa or moaning on the lavatory seat. Liffey was not good at
pain. Stoicism was her mother’s prerogative. Madge, even if stung by a wasp,
would manage to clamp her teeth before the involuntary scream could be fully
released. Liffey, similarly stung, would shriek and jump and fling her arms
about, breaking dishes and spilling food, giving easy voice to pain, shock and
indignation.

 
          
Liffey
was afraid of pain, as people often are who have endured little of it. She had
never had a toothache, never broken a bone, and had spent a healthy youth,
unplagued by unpleasant minor illness. She avoided emotional pain by pulling
herself together when nasty or uncomfortable thoughts threatened, and diverting
herself conscientiously if she felt depression setting in. It could not always
be done, but she did her best. Liffey was afraid of childbirth because she knew
it would hurt. How could it not, if so large an object as a baby was to leave
so confined a space? And the cries and groans of women in childbirth was part
of her filmic youth: yes, that was pain, PAIN. And
Supposing
the baby were born deformed? The fear would accompany her pregnancy, she knew
it would. She could not say these things to Richard: women, though allowed to
flinch at spiders and shudder at the thought of dirtying their hands, were
expected to face pregnancy and childbirth with equanimity. Nor could she
expect sympathy from Madge, who would see it as further proof of her daughter’s
errant femininity.
And as for her friends—ah, her friends.
Only a few days away, and she could scarcely remember their names or their
faces. Liffey kept her fears to herself and let others believe her reluctance
to have a baby was in the term of an older generation “selfish” and in those of
her contemporaries “political”—namely, that she feared to lose her freedom and
her figure and sink into the maternal swamp.

 
          
Richard
gave up waiting for Liffey to feel better and fell asleep at two-fifteen. He
had had a long day. Up at seven, the strain of breakfast with friends, not
family: then the office, a business lunch, a conference: then the long drive
back to Liffey, then supper with the Pierces: and now poor Liffey groaning
and clutching her stomach. He doubted whether he could have managed to make
love to Liffey even had she been feeling well, even had her pains been due to
ovulation and she at her most fertile.