Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (31 page)

 
          
“I
like being pregnant,” said Liffey brightly. Liffey knew that she must now
assert her will against Mabs: must oppose bad with good, must send out against her
such spiritual forces as she could muster. Mabs had a strong, evil battalion
already assembled: as she doled out mixed thawed peas and carrots, and roast
and mashed potatoes both, she doled out spite, anger, enmity and mystery. They
were hers to distribute.

 
          
Wonderful
dinner! Liffey said so.

 
          
Liffey
must be cheerful, honest, ordinary, positive and kind. Then all might still be
well. She must set up a bulwark of goodwill. Her defence must be an armoury of
opposites. She had no attacking weapons. She could not love Mabs, who had stuck
a knife through Liffey, into Liffey’s baby, and twisted.

 
          
Mabs,
who limped when you drove a nail through her
footprint.

 
          
Ha-ha.

 
          
Yes,
Richard. Mabs, witch. Do you know? Are you part of it too?

 
          
Oh
madness! Paranoia! Pregnancy!

 
          
Liffey
looked down at her plate. On Richard’s plate and Tucker’s were good thick lean
and shapely slices of roast rib of beef. On her, Liffey’s, plate was a little
mound of fat and gristle.

 
          
Mabs
watched Liffey watching her plate. Liffey raised her eyes and stared at Mabs.

 
          
Mabs
smiled. Mabs knew. Mabs knew that Liffey knew that Mabs knew.

 
          
Richard
noticed nothing, or pretended to notice nothing. He was fishing for more
puffball slices with Tucker’s carving fork.

           
“Give Liffey a decent piece of
meat,” said Tucker mildly.

 
          
“She
doesn’t want too much at this stage,” said
Mabs,
“do
you Liffey?”

 
          
“I’m
fine,” said Liffey, “really fine with what I’ve got.”

 
          
Well
done, Liffey.

 
          
Of
course what it’s all about, thought Liffey, with the calmness born of
certainty, is that Mabs thinks
it’s
Tucker’s baby.

 
          
“Have
some puffball, Liffey,” said Mabs, “now Richard’s found it. I was hoping he’d
forget, but no such luck.”

 
          
“No,
thank you,” said Liffey. Ah, that was wrong. She should have accepted, devoured
her own flesh and blood. Or at any rate
her own
white,
bloodless flesh. The life blood drained away.
Too late.

 
          
“Liffey,”
said Richard, “you must at least taste. I insist. After all the trouble
everyone’s been to.”

 
          
Eat,
said the baby. You must choose now not between good and bad but between the
lesser of evils. Eat, smile,
hope
.

 
          
“Really,
Liffey,” chided Richard, “you’re supposed to be eating for two.”

 
          
“Don’t
upset her,” said Tucker. “Not in her condition.”

 
          
“It’s
an entirely natural process,” said Richard.
“Nothing to worry
about.
African mothers go into the bush, have their babies, pick them
up and go straight back to work in the fields.”

 
          
They
all looked at Liffey to see how she would take this.

 
          
“And
then they die,” said Liffey before she could stop herself. Open a chink to let
doubt out and a tide of ill-will would surge back in.

 
          
Bright,
brave, bold! That’s the way, Liffey. If ever you fought, fight now.

 
          
Liffey
laughed, to show she didn’t mean it.

 
          
“Exactly
when is the baby due?” asked Mabs.

 
          
“October
tenth,” said Richard for Liffey.

 
          
Mabs
got up and rummaged in a drawer amongst old batteries, dried-out pens, bills,
string, ancient powder puffs and tubes of this and that with stubborn tops, and
rusted skewers, and brought out a leaflet the cat had walked upon with muddy
paws. “The doctor gave me this,” she said.
“After the fifth
baby, in just about as many years.
He said I might work it out for
myself.”

           
“Work what out?” Tucker was nervous.

 
          
“When
it was, you know, conceived. It’s wonderful the way they can tell these days.
They know everything there is to know in hospitals.”

 
          
“It
was back in December or January some time,” said Liffey swiftly, vaguely.

 
          
“According
to this,” said Mabs, “it was over Christmas.”

 
          
“We
moved in on January seventh,” said Liffey thankfully.

 
          
“So
you did,” said Mabs. “Do you remember, Richard? What a terrible time you both
had? You had to rush straight off back to
London
, Richard, didn’t you, and then that weekend
poor Liffey had an upset stomach. I remember clearly thinking,
You
poor things if you expected a second honeymoon, you
certainly aren’t now getting one. Such lovebirds you seemed. Of course if
Liffey was pregnant, that explains her upset stomach.”

 
          
“Yes
I expect it does,” said Liffey.

 
          
“Nothing
to do with my cooking after all,” laughed Mabs. Then she seemed to look at the
leaflet more carefully. “No, wait a minute. Christmas was your last period. The
baby must have been conceived just around the time you moved in. I must say,
Richard, you don’t lose much time! In between all that running around and
train-catching. Remember?”

 
          
Richard
remembered very well. The days were seared into his memory.

 
          
“Of
course Tucker was over a lot, helping Liffey out,” said Mabs into the silence.
“That’s so, isn’t it, Tucker?”

 
          
Mabs
laughed. Tucker grunted.

 
          
“Of
course you
London
people are different,” said Mabs, “but I
don’t see anyone round here so easy about rearing another man’s child.”

 
          
Nobody
laughed or grunted or spoke.

 
          
Richard
blinked, as if by shutting his eyes he would then wake up into a more real and
more believable world.

 
          
Upstairs
Debbie screamed, but the sound went unnoticed.

 
          
“Do
shut up, Mabs,” said Tucker, “or I’ll break your bloody jaw.”

 
          
“I
think you’d better take me home, Richard,” said Liffey. “I don’t feel very
well.”

 
          
The
dull pain was gone but the piercing pain now seemed established as a permanent
reality and was increasing in intensity. A sizeable segment of placenta had
torn away from the uterine wall. Liffey, although ignorant of this fact—indeed,
having known remarkably little of what had been going on inside her for the
last nine months—nevertheless felt something was going wrong somewhere. Mabs’s
allegations and revelations seemed to Liffey now of no particular relevance.

 
          
But
for Richard, of course, they were.

 
          
“Home,”
he said. “What do you mean by home, Liffey? I don’t think what we have is a
home.”

 
          
Mabs,
Liffey realised, was on her feet, arm outstretched, pointing at Liffey, black
eyes staring.

 
          
“Thief,”
she cried. “You stole what was mine. I hope you die.”

 
          
“Richard,”
observed Liffey, “I do have a pain. I think we ought to go.”

 
          
“You
can’t pull the wool over my eyes,” said Richard. “What do you think I am?
A fool?
I could see the way things were going.” But of
course he hadn’t. All the same, the claim to knowledge lessened the humiliation
just a little.

 
          
Tucker
spoke.

 
          
“No
reason to think it’s my baby,” said Tucker to Richard, man to man. “Might be
yours, might be mine.”

 
          
Richard
turned his blue eyes, no longer merry but still crinkling, of executive habit,
to Liffey’s, and found them abstracted. He slapped her. Her head shook and her
body, but her look of indifference remained.

 
          
“Don’t
you see what you’ve done?” shouted Richard. He had trusted Liffey with the
better part of his nature and she had betrayed his trust. There was, he felt,
nothing good left in the world. And she had stolen so much of his past as well.
She had invalidated so much—the love and concern she had elicited from him; his
worry about the growing child; the guilt and inconvenience he had endured; the
conscience, and indeed the money he had expended—all had been for nothing, had
meant nothing, had been as little to Liffey as it had been, once, to his
mother. And Liffey seemed not even to notice his distress.

 
          
The
placenta tore a little further. Liffey’s uterus began to bleed. No doubt Mabs’s
curse—for curse it was, a malevolent force directed along a quivering
outstretched hand, and not a mere overlooking or ill-wishing—had something to
do with it, if only by virtue of the sudden alteration in Liffey’s hormonal
levels, as shock and anxiety assailed her, and the rise in her blood pressure
occasioned by sudden emotion.

 
          
Liffey
was not aware, so far, that she was bleeding. But the pain intensified.

 
          
“Take
me home, Richard,” said Liffey.

 
          
Richard
was staring at Tucker.
Little grimy Tucker in his collar and
tie.
Richard did not really believe that Tucker, by virtue of his way of
life, was his superior. Richard had been playing games, as the rich and
confident will do with the humble and struggling. Richard despised Tucker.

 
          
A
wife may be unfaithful with a prince and not be considered defiled. Glory can
be transmitted via the genitals. But Tucker!

 
          
“Richard,”
Liffey was saying, “I have to be looked after.”

 
          
“Let
him look after you,” said Richard, and left Mabs and Tucker’s house, head
hunched into his shoulders, walking briskly, stonily through the yard, mangy
dogs yapping at his crisp blue denim, Tony and Tina falling in behind, up the
lane, looking neither to left nor right, to where his car was parked outside
Honeycomb Cottage, and piled Tony and Tina in behind while they protested
about hunger and clothes and homework left behind, and drove to London.
Quickly, for fear of further pollution, as if evil followed him from the
Somerset
sky, as if
Glastonbury
was beaming out some kind of searchlight of
dismay, meant especially for him.

 
          
Richard
too got to Bella’s publishing party in time, but he was feeling sick with
misery, resentment and disillusion, and possibly also from Mabs’s dinner, and
did not enjoy the party at all. Afterwards he went to see Vanessa, who was
pleased to see him, in the way a rather busy person is pleased to see a stray
cat, and told him she’d been stoned out of her mind for the last few weeks but
had not reformed, and encouraged him to cry gently into the night for his lost
Liffey while she, Vanessa, rang girlfriend after girlfriend to discuss the
ethics of whether or not she should own a car, positing the good of comfort
against the evil of lead pollution of the sky. He heard himself referred to as
a strung-out executive hung-up on a wife who was having it off with a cow-hand,
and fell asleep, reassured by the ease with which words could modify
experience.