Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (3 page)

 
          
“I
hate cows,” said Bella.

 
          
“I
rather like them,” said Ray.
“Plump and female.”

 
          
Bella,
who was not so much slim as scrawny, took this as an attack, and rightly so.

 
          
They
drove back to
London
,
with Bella’s mouth set like a trap and
Ray’s arm muscles sinewy, so tight was his grasp on the steering wheel. Liffey
admired the muscles. Richard, though broad and brave, was a soft man—not fat,
but unmuscled. Richard’s hands were white and smooth. Tucker’s, she had
noticed, were gnarled, rough and grimy, like the earth. A faint sweet smell of
puffball filled the car.

 
          
The pain Liffey felt
was nothing to do
with Tucker’s kicking of the puffball. It was a mid-cycle pain, the kind of
pain quite commonly, if inexplicably, felt by women who take the contraceptive
pill. It is not an ovulation pain, for such women do not ovulate. But the pain
is felt, nevertheless, and at that time.

 
          
Liffey,
on this particular September day, was twelve days in to her
one-hundred-and-seventy-first menstrual cycle. She had reached the menarche
rather later than the average girl, at fifteen years and three months.

           
Liffey’s mother, Madge, worried, had
taken her to the doctor when she was fourteen and a half. “She isn’t
menstruating,” said Madge bleakly. Madge was often bleak. “Why?”

 
          
“She’s
of slight build,” the doctor said.
“And by and large, the
lighter the girl, the later the period.”

 
          
Liffey
at the time had no desire whatsoever to start menstruating and took her
mother’s desire that she should as punitive. Liffey, unlike her mother but
like most women, had never cared to think too much about what was going on
inside her body. She regarded the inner, pounding, pulsating Liffey with
distaste, seeing it as something formless and messy and uncontrollable, and
being uncontrollable, better unacknowledged. She would rather think about and
identify wholly with the outer Liffey.
Pale and pretty and
nice.

 
          
It
was not even possible to accept, as it were, a bodily status quo, for her body
kept changing. Processes quite unknown to her, and indeed for the most part
unnoticeable, had gone on in her body from the beginning. When she was as young
as seven her ovaries had begun to release the first secretions of oestrogen,
and as the contours of her body had begun their change from child to woman, so
had vulva, clitoris, vagina, uterus, Fallopian tubes and ovaries, unseen and
unconsidered, begun their own path to maturity. The onset of menstruation would
occur when her body dictated, and not when the doctor or Madge or Liffey felt
it proper.

 
          
Her
menstrual cycle, once established, was of a steady, almost relentless
twenty-eight-day rhythm, which Liffey assumed to be only her right. Other girls
were early, or late, or undecided— trickled and flooded and stopped and
started.
But as the sun went down every twenty-eight days,
from the one-hundred- and-eighty-fourth calendar month of her life, Liffey
started to bleed.
Being able so certainly to predict this gave her at
least the illusion of being in control of her body.

 
          
Liffey
never enquired of anyone why she bled or what use the bleeding served. She knew
vaguely it had to do with having babies, and thought of it, if she thought at
all, as all her old internal rubbish being cleared away.

 
          
The
mechanics of her menstrual cycle were indeed ingenious.

           
Lunar month by Lunar month, since
she reached the men- arche. Liffey’s pituitary gland had pursued its own cycle,
secreting first, for a fourteen-day stretch, the hormones that would stimulate
the growth of follicles in Liffey’s ovaries. These follicles, some hundred or
so cyst-like nodules, in their turn secreted oestrogen, and would all grow
until, on the fourteenth day (at any rate in the years she was not taking the
pill), the biggest and best would drop off into the outer end of one of
Liffey’s Fallopian tubes and there, unfertilised, would rupture, allowing its
oestrogen to be absorbed. This was the signal for the remaindered follicles to
atrophy and for Liffey’s pituitary to start secreting for a further twelve
days, a hormone that would promote the formation of a corpus luteum, which
would secrete progesterone and flourish until the twenty-sixth day, when the
pituitary withdrew its supplies. Then the corpus luteum would start to
degenerate, and on the twenty-eighth day would be disposed of in the form of
menstrual flow—along, of course, with the lining of Liffey’s uterus, hopefully
and richly thickened over the previous twenty-eight days to receive a
fertilised ovum, but so far, on one hundred and seventy occasions,
disappointed.

 
          
The
disintegration and shedding of the uterus lining, signalled by the withdrawal
of oestrogen, would take three days, and thereafter the amount of blood lost
would gradually diminish as the uterus healed.

 
          
On
this, the twelfth day into Liffey’s cycle, the seventy-seventh follicle in the
left Fallopian tube was outstripping its fellows, distending the surface of
the ovary as a cystic swelling almost half an inch in diameter. But owing to
the fact that Liffey had been taking the pill, her body had been hoodwinked,
so that the ovum would have no time to actually fall, but would merely atrophy
along with its fellows.

 
          
Did
a tremor of disappointment shake Liffey’s body? Did the thwarting of so much
organic organisation register on her consciousness? Certainly she had a pain,
and certainly Mabs’s eyes flickered as Liffey winced—but that too could be
coincidence.

 
          
Mabs and Tucker
walked up to Honeycomb
Cottage. They liked to go walking over their land, and that of their
neighbours, just to see what was happening. As people in cities turn to plays
or films for event, so did Mabs and Tucker turn to the tracks of badgers, or
observe the feathers where the fox had been or the owl, or fret at just how
much the summer had dried the stream or the rain swelled it. A field, which to
a stranger is just a field, to those who know it is a battleground for
combatant plant and animal life, and the traces of victory and defeat are
everywhere.

 
          
Tucker
came across another puffball and kicked it, taking a run, letting a booted foot
fly, entering energetically into the conflict. “Nasty unnatural things,” said
Mabs. She remembered her mother before her sister Carol had been
born,
and the swollen white of her belly as she lifted her
skirt and squatted to urinate, as was her custom, in the back garden. Mabs’s
mother, Mrs. Tree, thought it was wasteful to let good powerful bodily products
vanish down the water closet. This belief was a source of much bitterness and
shame to her two daughters and one of the reasons they married so early.

 
          
Mrs.
Tree was
a
herbalist, in the old tradition. Her
enemies, and she had many, said she was a witch, and even her friends
recognised her as a wise woman. On moonlit nights, even now, she would switch
off the television and go gathering herbs— mugwort and comfrey, cowslip and
henbane, or any of the hundred or more plants she knew by sight and name. She would
scrape roots and strip bark, would simmer concoctions of this or that on her
gas stove at home, with distillations and precipitations. The drugs she
prepared—like her mother’s before her—were the same as those the local doctor
had to offer: psychoactive agents, prophylactics, antiseptics, narcotics, hypnodes,
anaesthedcs and andbiotics. But Mrs. Tree’s medicines served, in overdose, not
just to restore
a normal
body chemistry but to incite
to love and hate, violence and passivity, to bring about increased sexual
activity or impotence, pain, irritability, skin disease, wasting away, and even
death. She made an uneasy mother.

 
          
“Does
your mother use puffballs?” Tucker asked Mabs.

 
          
Mabs
didn’t reply, and he knew he should not have asked. She liked to pretend that
her mother was just like anyone else. But Tucker, as was only natural in the
circumstances, would roll food around in his mouth before he swallowed,
searching for strange tastes. Such knowledge passed from mother to daughter.

 
          
“Puffballs
are too nasty even for my mum,” said Mabs presently. “They’re the devil’s
eyeballs.”

 
          
“Isn’t
it dark and poky!” said Mabs, pushing open the front door of Honeycomb Cottage.
“I’d rather have a nice new bungalow any day. But the view’s good, I’ll say
that.”

 
          
Mabs
waved at Glastonbury Tor, in a familiar kind of way, as she went inside. The
sun was setting behind the hill in a bloodred sky.

 
          
“I
wonder if they’ll live like pigs,” said Mabs, “the way they act like pigs,” and
she looked at Tucker slyly out of the corner of her eye so that he started
grunting and waddling like a pig and pushed her with his belly into the corner
and bore down upon her, laughing: and they made love in the red light that
shone in diamonds through the latticed windows.

 
          
“So
she’s too skinny for you, is she,” said Mabs presently.

 
          
“Yes,”
said Tucker.

 
          
“You
might have to learn to like it,” said Mabs.
“Just once or
twice.”

 
          
“Why’s
that?” asked Tucker surprised.

 
          
“It’s
important to have a hold,” said Mabs. “You can’t be too careful with neighbours.”

 
          
“You
wouldn’t like it,” said Tucker. “Not one bit.”

 
          
“I’m
not the jealous type,” said Mabs. “You know that. Not if there’s something to
be got out of it. I don’t mind things done on purpose.
It’s
things done by accident I don’t like.”

           
They walked back hand in hand to
Cadbury Farm. She was so large and slow, and he was so small and lively, they
had to keep their hands locked to stay in pace with each other.

 
          
The
dogs in the courtyard barked, and Tucker kicked them.

 
          
“They’re
hungry,” Mabs protested.

 
          
“A
good watchdog is always hungry,” said Tucker. “That’s what makes it good.”

 
          
The
children were hungry as well, but Mabs reserved her sympathy for the dogs. Mabs
had five children. The eldest, Audrey, was fourteen. The youngest, Kevin, was
four. Mabs slapped small hands as they crept over the tabletop to steal crusts
from the paste sandwiches she prepared for their tea. All her children were
thin. Presently Mabs picked up a wooden spoon and used that as a cane, to save
her own hand smarting as she slapped. One of the children gave a cry of pain.

 
          
“You
shouldn’t have done that,” said Tucker, taking notice.

 
          
“My children.
I do as I please.” She did too, according to
mood.

 
          
“You’re
too hard on them.”

 
          
She
said nothing.

 
          
Her
breasts were full and round beneath the old sweater.

 
          
Tucker’s
eyelids drooped in memory of them.

 
          
“Get
the bleeding sauce,” Mabs shouted at Eddie. Eddie was her third child, and
irritated her
most,
and she slapped and shouted at him
more than she did at the others. He took after her, being large and slow. She
preferred her children to take after Tucker. The cruel audacity that in Mabs
was almost attractive was in Eddie something nasty and sly. She had slapped
and startled him too often: he lived in the expectation of sudden disaster and
now cringed in corners. Nobody liked him. He was eight now, and it would be the
same when he was eighty. Audrey, Mabs’s eldest, looked after him. She was kind
where her mother was
cruel,
and clever at her books.
Mabs took her books away because she put on airs.

 
          
Mabs
and Tucker ate fish fingers and tinned spaghetti. The children made do with the
sandwiches.

 
          
That
night Mabs sat at the window and watched a sudden storm blow up over the Tor.
Black clouds streamed out from it, like steam from a kettle, and formed into
solid masses at the corners of the sky. Lightning leapt between the clouds.
Thunder rumbled and rolled, but the rain did not start.

 
          
“Come
to bed,” said Tucker.

 
          
“There
are people in Honeycomb Cottage,” said Mabs. But Tucker couldn’t see them,
although he came to stand beside her. Lightning lit up the interior of the
rooms and made strange shapes that could have been anything.

 
          
“What
sort of people?” he asked cautiously.

 
          
“Him
and her,” said Mabs. “It won’t be long now.”

 
          
“At
it again are they?”

 
          
“No,”
said Mabs. “They were in opposite corners of the room. She was holding a baby.”

 
          
“I
know what’s the matter with you,” said Tucker. “You want another baby.”

 
          
“No
I don’t,” she said, but he knew she did. Her youngest child was four years old.
Mabs liked to be pregnant. Tucker wondered how long it would be before she
began to think it was his fault and what means she would find to punish him.

 
          
“Come
to bed,” he said, “and we’ll see what we can do.”

 
          
It
was a rare thing for him to ask. Usually she was there first, lying in wait,
half inviting, half commanding,
a
channel for forces
greater than herself. Come on, quick, again, again! Impregnate, fertilise. By
your will, Tucker, which is only partly your will, set the forces of division
and multiplication going. Now!