Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (26 page)

 
          
Thirty-four weeks.

           
“Still a placenta praevia,” said the
doctor to Liffey. “But never mind. We’ll take care of you. And the baby will be
saved the struggle of getting out, won’t he?”

 
          
Ah,
but what about me, doctor? What about my tight and stretching tummy? Where are
you going to take your knife and slit it?
From top to bottom
or side to side?

 
          
“You’ll
have to see the specialist,” said the doctor. “I’ll send you to see him this
week.”

 
          
The
hospital was large and new, hot and carpeted. Pregnant ladies walked bright
corridors up and down, up and down, dressing gowns stretched to cover swollen
tummies. Young men waited at telephones, faces elated or anxious or bored.

 
          
“We’ll
give you a bikini scar,” said the specialist.
“Just below the
line of your pubic hair.
Almost unnoticeable.
That’s if all goes well, of course. If we’re in a hurry we do the best we can,
for you and
baby,
and without a doubt that
old-fashioned navel-to-pubis cut is quicker and safer. But there you are—you
girls think of your figure more than your baby.”

           
Liffey didn’t like the specialist.
Nor did he particularly like women.

 
          
“We’ll
keep the baby inside you as long as we possibly can. If you start to bleed,
which you probably will soon, because the placenta’s likely to tear when it’s
down there, and then the blood starts, and you’ll go on bleeding until the
baby’s out. So when I say to come in quickly if you see so much as a spot of
blood, that’s what I mean. A placenta praevia is rare in a first pregnancy. You
sure you haven’t been pregnant before?

 
          
“Quite sure.”

 
          
“You’re
not hiding anything?”

 
          
She
began to think perhaps she was
,
such was the force of
his suspicion, his determination that all women were fools and knaves and the
enemies of their babies. She tried to think, but could not, to give her past a
reality acceptable to him. Yes, I have had measles and mumps—but a baby? Did I?
Her silence irritated him.

 
          
“Well,
let’s say you’re just unlucky.”

 
          
Liffey
thought, all of a sudden: Mabs did this to me. If she was unlucky it was
because Mabs had done it to her. She had never been unlucky before. The baby
danced and laughed to confirm her conclusion. Mabs was not a friend, she was an
enemy.

 
          
“Active
little beggar,” said the specialist. His hands, she acknowledged, however much
she disliked them, were experienced and competent. “You’re lucky to have kept
him inside this long. You’re sure there’s been no bleeding?”

 
          
“No.”

 
          
“No,
you’re not sure, or no, there’s been no bleeding?”

 
          
Ah,
he was a bully.

 
          
Never
mind,
sang the baby, never mind. I’ll be all right. So
will you. Liffey felt she had to protect such charming naivety.

 
          
“No
bleeding.” There will be no bleeding either until my baby is forty weeks old,
give or take a day or two. My baby’s no fool.
Nor am I.
I’ll keep him in and he’ll cooperate.

 
          
“He
isn’t the most tactful of men,” said the doctor tentatively, of the specialist.
“But on the other hand, he won’t let you die.”

 
          
Liffey
was elated. She felt that things were better now between
herself
and Richard. She felt sure the baby would nudge the placenta praevia over when
it felt like it. She did not believe her mother-in-law’s account of her
husband’s birth. She would keep out of Mabs’s way and things would go better.

 
          
Thirty-four
weeks. Oh, she was heavy, breathless, and languid, but she was still happy.
Richard had, for some reason, turned vegetarian, so she worried in case she was
not eating enough meat for the baby’s welfare. Richard assured her that animal
flesh did more harm to the human body than good. He wore a lovely pair of
thonged sandals. They had a good weekend. He took her to the pub, which she
liked but knew he hated. He had enough of people during the week. So he said.

 
          
Richard
had lately met up with a girl called Vanessa. She had auditioned for a part in
a television commercial for oxtail soup, and failed to get it, but had given
Richard her telephone number. She was an actress, had a degree from
Oxford
, a flat and slender crotch across which
jeans strained, a mother who was a countess, and her own apartment. Richard
thought she was just about right for him. She was a vegetarian and thought that
sex was yucky and pushed off roving hands, but Richard thought she would soon
be cured of that. She was twenty-one.

 
          
He
was particularly animated and cheerful that weekend. He told Liffey about Ray’s
love for Karen and how it upset Bella.

 
          
“So
long as she doesn’t expect you to comfort her,” said Liffey.

 
          
Richard
shuddered at the thought.

 
          
“Bella,”
he said, “is a withered bag who talks too much. I’m sorry for her, and she’s
good to me, but I could no more—oh, really, Liffey!”

 
          
“What
about Helga?” Sometimes Liffey wondered about Helga.

 
          
“Helga
is a hausfrau, and I don’t go for hausfraus. You’ll be laying the finger on
poor Miss Martin next.”

 
          
“You
did go off with your secretary last Christmas.”

 
          
“Go
off with? You mean she fell on top of me at a drunken party, and if you hadn’t
been spying you’d never even have known.”

 
          
“I
wasn’t spying.”

           
But he was angry, and made her drink
up and took her home.

 
          
He
relented as they passed Cadbury Farm and kissed her proffered cheek. Her skin
these days was hot to the touch, as if fires burned inside her.

 
          
“I
think Mabs is a witch,” said Liffey as they passed the farm.

 
          
“That’s
a very unkind thing to say about a neighbour,” said Richard.

 
          
“If
you nailed her footprint to the ground,” said Liffey, “I bet she’d limp. That’s
how you can tell a witch.”

 
          
The
next day, giggling and absurd, as in the old days, they crept down the lane
when Mabs and Tucker were out, and found a footprint made by Mabs in the marshy
ground where she went to feed her ducks, and hammer, hammer, Richard drove a
nail right into it.

 
          
Then
they watched and waited for Mabs to come back, and sure enough, when she did,
she was limping. They laughed and laughed, and went up later to the farm and
asked what was the matter with Mabs’s foot, and Mabs replied she’d stubbed her
big toe and all but broken it, hadn’t she, Tucker? And Tucker said yes, she’d
walked straight into a tree stump, what’s the matter with you two?
For they were stifling giggles, but of course they couldn’t say—ah,
like the old times back again.
Happy days.
That
night they lay curled like spoons together, and Richard stayed until Monday
morning and kissed Liffey goodbye as if he meant it and didn’t want to go. And
he didn’t.

 
          
Honeycomb
Cottage, as he looked back at it from the car, nestled amidst hollyhocks and
roses like a childhood dream of the future. This was surely what he wanted and
enough for any man.

 
          
And
Liffey, waving goodbye, sensed it, and hoped yet to achieve what her mother had
not—an ordinary marriage, and ordinary family, and ordinary happiness.

 
          
But
the next day she had a nasty pain in her sacroiliac joint, at the top of her
buttocks, three inches to the right of midpoint, and could hardly walk.

 
          
Mabs
came over by chance with some honey, and sent Tucker over to drive her at once
to the doctor’s surgery. Liffey was in such pain she almost forgot her dislike
of the Pierce’s car.

 
          
“Was
that Tucker Pierce?” asked the doctor, manipulating the joint.

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
“He’s
changed,” said the doctor. “It’s not in his nature to do good turns. Not in
anyone’s round here, come to that.”

 
          
He’d
just sent the ambulance for the body of a recluse, found badly decayed in the
caravan he’d inhabited for fifteen years.

 
          
“His
wife makes him,” said Liffey. She’d forgotten all the nonsense about Mabs being
a witch; all, all had been washed away in loving laughter and trust of Richard.

 
          
Liffey’s
back creaked and cracked as the doctor pressed and dug, and the pain went,
although the joint remained a little tender.

 
          
“Well,”
said Tucker, “here we
are,
just you and me. Time we
had a little talk.”

 
          
“What
about, Tucker?”

 
          
“Don’t
get all la-di-dah with me. That’s my baby you’ve got in there and don’t you
forget it.”

 
          
“Tucker!”
she was horrified. “You can’t think that. It couldn’t possibly be yours.”

 
          
“Mabs
thinks it is. According to her sister’s friend who works up at the doctor’s,
it’s as like as not my baby.”

 
          
“You
mean Mabs
knows?”

 
          
“Of
course she knows. She’s my wife. We have no secrets.”

           
“You
told
her?”

           
“Of course.”

 
          
Liffey
was quite cold with shock. Gentlemen did not kiss and tell, but Tucker, after
all, was no gentleman. And secrecy
rose
out of guilt,
but Tucker felt no guilt: and if Mabs knew, what was there to stop her telling
Richard?

 
          
Tucker’s
hand was unbuttoning her Mothercare blouse.

 
          
“No
please, Tucker.”

 
          
“Why not?”

 
          
“I’m
pregnant.”

 
          
“Anyone
can see that. It’s not comfortable in here. Come out on the grass.”

 
          
“No.”

           
“Why not?
What you do once you can do twice.”

 
          
“Tucker,
I can’t, I mustn’t. Please. My back still hurts.”

 
          
“I
expect it does, at that,” he said kindly. “I’ll be over in a day or two. No
hurry.”

 
          
He
started the engine and they bumped back to the cottage.

 
          
I
can deny it, thought Liffey wildly. I can deny everything. That’s all I have to
do. Tell Richard that Tucker tried to rape me—tell Richard I’m coming up to
London, I can’t stay here, he has to think of something, some way we can live
together.