Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (30 page)

 
          
Please,
dear God, let me like you, love you,
trust
you.

 
          
“Don’t
you love the smell of puffballs?” Richard asked.

 
          
“Wonderful!”
said Liffey.
“Of the earth, earthy.”

 
          
Tucker, with earth beneath his nails.
That was not love, or
lust, or folly, or spite: that had nothing to do with the will, with the desire
for good or
bad, that
was simply what had happened.

           
An open
door,
and someone coming through it, further and further, until he was not just
inside the room but inside her as well.

 
          
“I
don’t know what you had to go and ask them over for,” grumbled Mabs. She was
preparing a distillation of motherwort for
herself,
and syrup of buckthorn for Debbie, who complained of stomach pains, presumably
due to constipation. Debbie was locked in her room for not having properly
cleaned the kitchen and was using the pains as an excuse.

 
          
Mabs
was in good spirits. Tucker had taken her to a dance at
Taunton
. She’d had her hair done at the
hairdresser’s and bought a new flowered skirt.

 
          
The
milk yield accepted and paid for by the Milk Marketing Board was higher than it
had ever been—the cattle sheds could be retiled: it had been a good spring for
silage and a fine summer for hay. Apart from Liffey’s baby, and her own
inability to conceive, it might almost be called a lucky year.

 
          
The
bad times were nearly over. Mabs felt that once Liffey’s baby was delivered,
she would start her own. That was the way things went. And she confidently
expected Liffey to die under the surgeon’s knife.

 
          
Mabs
gave Tucker a twist of thornapple in his elderberry wine, which made him mellow
and complaisant, and took the edge out of his complaints, and she felt it was
rather an improvement. His love-making lasted longer too.

 
          
Early
on Sunday morning Ray took Tony out for a walk. They went up the hill and
stopped at the point where there was an excellent view of the Tor. As they
paused, and puffed—for neither was in good condition—they saw a round red
spinning disc of considerable size but unclear distance move towards them, move
away again, vanish, reappear, shift colour from red to orange, and depart
again, not to reappear.

 
          
Ray
and Tony were silent.

 
          
“That
was a flying saucer,” said Ray eventually.

 
          
“Don’t
be stupid, Dad,” said Tony, embarrassed. “Anyway don’t call them flying
saucers. They’re UFOs.”

 
          
“But
you do agree we saw one?”

           
“No, I don’t,” said Tony wretchedly.

 
          
Ray
ran back to report his sighting, and had to wake a sleeping house to do so.
Bella was angry.

 
          
“Your
brain’s gone to jelly,” she shouted. “You’re so afraid of your own mortality
you’ve taken to seeing things.”

 
          
“It
was real, Bella.”

 
          
“Tony,
did you see the same thing as your father did?”

 
          
“There
was something, Mum, but it could have been a fireball or a shooting star or
something.”

 
          
Ray
took hold of Tony and shook him.

 
          
“If
you ask me,” said Bella, “that’s the first physical contact you’ve had with
your son since the day he was born.”

 
          
Ray
stopped shaking.

 
          
“Everything
wonderful in my life,” he said to Bella sadly, “you destroy. I can’t even see a
flying saucer but you entirely spoil and diminish the event.”

 
          
“UFO,”
said Tony.

 
          
The
quarrel continued until it was impossible for Bella and Ray to stay under the
same roof. Tony and Tina wandered in the garden. Bella demanded that Richard
take her to the station at once, and Ray got in the car at the last moment,
and Liffey did what she could to comfort Tony and Tina. Their parents did not
have the spiritual energy left to say goodbye.

 
          
Bella
got to her publisher’s party.

 
          
Richard
was laughing when he got home. “Oh, Liffey, darling,” he said, “
how
lucky we are. We’ve had our hard times, but things are
going to be better from now on.”

 
          
He
touched no wood as he spoke.

 
          
Sun glazed,
flowers glowed, bees
droned. Richard and Liffey walked down the lane from Honeycomb Cottage to
Cadbury Farm on the way to Sunday lunch. They held hands. Tony and Tina, taken
aback by their parents’ sudden departure, walked behind, subdued.

 
          
Now,
in late summer, after a season of Liffey’s tending, the cottage might have
graced the top of a chocolate box. Hollyhocks, roses and wallflowers tumbled
together against the whitewashed walls; swallows dived and soared above the
thatch; Tucker’s black-and-white cows grazed serenely in the field behind; down
on the stream moorhens paddled against the current in the dappled shadow of
weeping willows. Peas and beans and carrots flourished again in the small
vegetable patch, and there would have been potatoes in the field had it not
been for the hungry cows.

 
          
“You
do make the best of everything, Liffey,” said Richard contentedly as they
walked.

 
          
He
carried a puffball with him. It was tucked under his arm. It seemed to stare
ahead as he walked; there were, by chance, blemishes spaced like eyes and mouth
on its smooth surface. He was taking it as a gift for Mabs.

 
          
“I’m
not sure she’ll appreciate it,” Liffey said.

 
          
“But
they’re so nourishing,” Richard replied, “and so delicious. I’ll convert her.”

 
          
They
came to the end of the wood. The long grey building of Cadbury Farm lay before
them, with its crumbling dry stone walls, and the neglected outhouses, with
their collapsing red-tiled roofs. Away to the right of them the ground swept
down and across the levels of the valley, past small villages and hedgerowed
meadows, threaded by ribbons of road, where toy cars and lorries trundled, to
where the Tor rose, suddenly and dramatically, at odds with the gentle
landscape that surrounded it.

 
          
“They
say there’s a magnetic-force line straight from the Tor to
Jerusalem
,” said Richard.

 
          
“Who
says?”

 
          
“Can’t
remember,” said Richard. It had been Vanessa. She had told him to find a pine
tree on a ley line and lean against it whenever his system needed revitalising.
She had told him about twisted apple trees and yews that marked the radiating
force lines from the Tor; about the old roads between Stonehenge and Glastonbury;
about how it was no coincidence that he lived in London in the shadow of
Primrose Hill—also seat of power—and in the country in the shadow of the Tor.
Deciding, by virtue of his dwelling place, that Richard must be a rather
special person after all, she had allowed him to sleep with her, and declared
herself revitalised by the encounter and not—as she had feared—enervated. But
she would not repeat the experience, no matter how his by now practiced hand
strayed over her long, young, cool body. Once was enough, she said. They knew
all there was about one another now—she’d as soon recharge herself against a
pine tree or a ley line. But could he get her another modelling job?

 
          
Richard
thought he probably couldn’t, but since then had regarded the Tor with more
respect, as something with spiritual meaning, which could bring good things
about, rather than a tourist trap for ruined abbey and UFO freaks. Things had
gone wrong since then. He’d talked to Vanessa about Liffey.

 
          
“I
didn’t know you were married,” she’d said, surprised. “I don’t want to get into
all that
scene. You should have told me.

 
          
“I
didn’t think marriage mattered to you lot, one way or another.”

 
          
But
it had seemed to; she had said she’d ring him when she’d worked things out, but
hadn’t rung: and Richard was vaguely sorry, since Vanessa was restful, and her
expectations from sex so little that he was bound to please, and his attempts
at seduction for that reason unclouded but relieved as well.
All that was behind him now.

 
          
“You’re
not tired?” he asked now solicitously.

 
          
“No,”
said Liffey. But she was. From time to time she had a dragging pain in her
abdomen.

 
          
Thirty-eight weeks.
The average
duration of pregnancy is forty weeks, but can vary from woman to
woman,
and from one pregnancy to another, and from one
marriage to another. Each pregnancy differs: each woman differs. Liffey’s baby
was ready.

 
          
All
through life the muscles of a woman’s uterus, like the muscles in the rest of
her body, contract and relax from time to time, lest they waste away. All
through pregnancy uterine contractions occur, every half hour or less, for
about half a minute at a time. In late pregnancy they become noticeable, though
not painful: they are known as Braxton Hicks contractions. When labour begins,
these contractions become regular, stronger, and more forceful. They last for
forty seconds or more: they mount to a crescendo more slowly, fade away more
gradually. As labour progresses, uterine contractions come at shorter and
shorter intervals; they are designed to eliminate the canal of the cervix
without damaging its muscle, incorporating it into the lower uterine segment,
so that the baby can be expelled. The upper uterine segment, where the
contraction begins, and which consists almost entirely of muscle, behaves
during labour in a unique way, known as retraction. It shortens itself slightly
after every contraction, thus increasing its pulling power on the lower
segment, which is already much stretched and weakened by the baby it contains.
The pressures produced inside are considerable. The cervix, as the canal above
it is, little by little, inexorably, drawn up, widens, or dilates, eventually
making an opening some nine and a half centimeters in diameter, enough for the
baby’s head to pass through—all going well with the baby, that is. This first
stage of labour, as it is called, takes a different length of time in different
women, varying from two hours to twenty-four but with some exceptions either
side. It is not possible to anticipate the duration of a labour, or whether the
contractions will be experienced as discomfort or pain: but as a rough working
estimate, it requires some one hundred and fifty contractions to produce a
first child, about seventy-five for a second or third child, and about fifty
for a fourth.

 
          
Liffey,
walking down the lane with Richard, had a mild backache and a slight dragging
pain in her tummy, but so she’d had from time to time over the past few weeks.
Earlier in the morning she’d had an uprush of energy—had swept and cleaned and
even scrubbed, under and around her warring guests, but this had now passed,
leaving her soft and languid.

 
          
“What
a pity,” said Mabs when they got to the farm, “I was expecting your smart
London
friends. So was Tucker. Weren’t you,
Tucker!
”

 
          
“They
had to get back in a hurry,” said Richard.

 
          
“
London
folk are always in a hurry,” said Mabs,
shooing Tina and Tony out into the yard. “I suppose my invitation wasn’t good
enough for the likes of them.”

 
          
She
was annoyed. Richard offered her the puffball by way of pacification. It made
her laugh.

 
          
“God-awful
things,” she said. “You’re quite mad, Richard." But she consented to slice
it, a little later, and place it under the roast to catch the drippings and
serve it like Yorkshire pud
ding.

 
          
“Just
because I never have,” said Mabs nobly, “is no reason why I never should.” Her
annoyance seemed to have evaporated. She smiled at Liffey and pulled back a
chair for her, saying, “Don’t go into the parlour, since it’s only you.
Stay and talk while I work.”

 
          
Tucker
served elderberry wine, clearing a space on the crowded Jtable for bottle and
glasses.

 
          
“How
are you keeping, Liffey?” he asked. “No pains?”

 
          
“No
more than usual,” said Liffey.

 
          
“She’s
not allowed to produce for another two weeks,” said Richard. “I can’t take time
off until then.”

 
          
“You’re
not going to be
there
said Mabs in
horror.

 
          
“Fathers
are supposed to be,” said Richard helplessly.

           
“Liffey, you wouldn’t want him to
see you in that state?” demanded Mabs.

 
          
Both
Mabs and Tucker wore their Sunday best. Tucker was wearing a collar and tie,
which somehow diminished him. It made him
seem
uneasy
and ordinary, and grimy rather than weathered, as if the ingraining
accomplished by sun and wind was the mark of poverty. Mabs wore an
oyster-coloured silk blouse, already splashed by juices from the rib of beef
she was roasting and the sprouts she was stewing, but her hair was pulled
firmly and neatly back, showing her broad face to advantage. She has lost
weight recently, Liffey decided, and that made her high cheek bones more
prominent and her dark eyes larger and more glittery than usual. Moreover,
Mabs, who seldom so much as looked in a mirror but saw herself, as it were,
defined by sky and hills, had today outlined them with black.

 
          
A
witch, thought Liffey.
A witch preparing for witchery.
The ceremonial has begun.

 
          
Nonsense,
thought Liffey. My neighbour, about whom I sometimes get strange fancies,
connected no doubt with my pregnancy.
My neighbour, the salt
of the earth.

 
          
“I
don’t think it’s going to apply,” said Liffey. “I’m going to have a Caesarian
anyway. Or so they say.”

 
          
“They
only say you might, Liffey,” said Richard. “Don’t exaggerate.”

 
          
“It’s
natural for her to get nervous,” said Tucker, “at this stage.”

 
          
“The
way I look at it,” said Mabs, “a man’s place during child-birth is down at the
pub.”

 
          
Everyone
laughed.
Even Liffey.

 
          
Tony
and Tina had been given a bag of crisps each and sent out to play with the
others. The others were nowhere to be seen, so they sat on a wall and swung
their legs and waited, with some alarm, for further events to transpire. They
were hungry, but relieved not to have to sit down with the grown-ups for
dinner. They were accustomed to the stripped pine furniture, uncluttered lines
and primary colours of home, and found the rich dark mahogany and oak, the
dust, and litter and the crumbling walls of the Pierce’s kitchen oppressive.
They were accustomed, moreover, to adults who talked to them and who did not
offer
them
crisps in lieu of conversation. They were
accustomed to Richard but did not trust him; liked Liffey but judged that she
was hardly in a condition to look after them; were angry with their parents for
abandoning them; and missed Helga. They munched and crunched their crisps, and
were silent, faces impassive.

 
          
Mabs
had got their names wrong—had taken Tina for a boy, Tony for a girl.

 
          
“You
can’t tell which is which,” she complained in their hearing. “I’d be ashamed to
let my children out looking like that.”

 
          
Debbie
was locked in her room again. Today the reason given was that she had failed to
clean her father’s Sunday shoes. She lay with her legs drawn up to her chest,
occasionally vomiting and groaning. She had had another dose of buckthorn to
cure her constipation.

 
          
Buckthorn
was a tall shrub that grew in the woods around. It had little creamy white
flowers in spring and inviting black berries in autumn, and grew, in these
parts, without thorns. The thorny kind, or Spina-Christi, provided Christ’s
crown of thorns; Mabs’s kind, though without thorns, provided a powerful
cascara-like purgative, which she prepared, with sugar and ginger, from the
dried berries, and with which, like her mother, grandmother and
great-grandmother before her, she dosed her children, doing them one damage or
another. It was a local custom so to do. Dr. Southey would suggest to mothers
that they keep it for cows, but they politely agreed and kept on dosing.
Sometimes he thought he would emigrate and take a post in
Central Africa
, where superstition and witchcraft would be
something clear and definite to be grappled with, not a running, secret thread
through the fabric of life.

 
          
Eddie
played silently in the corridor outside Debbie’s room. He crouched on the
floor, listening to her groans,
zooming
his hand over
the rug like a dive-bombing plane. There were blue bruises on his upper arms.
Eddie was waiting for Audrey to come back from church. Audrey had a nice voice
and a natural ear and had joined the church choir, partly because she could
make thirty-five pence a wedding and more for funerals and partly because she
fancied the curate, Mr. Simon Eaves. She looked at him with large, glittery,
inviting eyes, and he struggled to believe there was no invitation in them; she
was a child.

 
          
Today
Audrey asked if she could stay behind after church and
speak
to him, and Mr. Eaves felt he could not very well refuse, and also that it
would be prudent not to see her alone.

 
          
“Well,”
said Mabs, preparing the puffball for the oven, “I don’t know about you lot, but
I’m certainly looking forward to the baby. You’ve really made me feel quite
broody, Liffey.”

 
          
She
sliced into the puffball with too blunt a knife, so that the edge crumbled as
if it were
a ripe
Stilton she was parting and not an
edible fungus.

 
          
As
she cut through the flesh, not cleanly, but bruising and chipping on the way,
she stared at Liffey’s stomach.

 
          
“I’m
imagining it,” thought Liffey. If she were doing it on purpose, surely Richard
would have noticed? But Richard smiled amiably on, his mind on good red meat
juices and the creamy texture of roasted puffball. And Tucker stared into space
and drank.

 
          
But
why
does Mabs hate
me, wondered Liffey. I am not a
hateful person. I am a nice person. Everyone likes me. They may forget me, but
if I’m around, they like me.

 
          
I
have slept with Mabs’s husband, but Mabs doesn’t know that. Mabs can’t know.
Tucker was lying.

 
          
When
the knife had pierced to the very centre of the puffball, Mabs gave it another
twist.

 
          
She
hates my baby too. She wants to kill it.

 
          
Liffey
looked at Richard for help. Richard was speaking.

 
          
“Puffballs
are truly amazing.
Nature’s richest bounty.
And you
can hang them up and dry them, and then they make wonderful firelighters. Did
you know that, Tucker?”

 
          
“Can’t
say I did,” said Tucker. “We use a gas poker to light our fires, in any case.”

 
          
He
smiled at Richard as he spoke, as a grown-up might smile at a rather slow
child, and then he looked at Liffey with a sympathetic expression on his face,
which would have been pleasant enough except that Mabs was watching Tucker
watching her, and Mabs’s eyes seemed not just brown, dark brown, but deepest
black.

           
Things fell into place.

 
          
Mabs
knows Tucker comes up to see me. Tucker wasn’t lying. Mabs knows. Knows he came
up again, and I let him.

 
          
Make
it a dream.

 
          
Dinner
is served, in the cold dining room, on the French- polished table. It is a room
that is hardly ever used. .

 
          
“So,
Liffey,” said Mabs brightly. Tucker carved. Mabs served. A face appeared
briefly and hungrily at the window, and disappeared again.
Tina’s.
“Only two weeks more to go. I expect you’ll be glad when it’s over.”