Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (34 page)

 
          
Liffey slept.
The baby slept. Mabs went
home.

 
          
“It
wasn’t your baby after all,” she said to Tucker, and they went upstairs to try
for another one. This time sufficient of Tucker’s sperm survived the hazardous
journey up to Mabs’s Fallopian tubes to rupture the walls of a recently dropped
ovum—fallen rather ahead of time, by virtue of the emotion of tenderness and
remorse, mixed, which had flooded Mabs when she marvelled over Baby Lee-Fox,
and laughed at his looks. Richard’s bemused air of competence combined with
innocence, Liffey’s gentle generosity—as if the baby, wonderfully, had captured
both their good qualities as they flew, and let the others pass.

 
          
Mabs,
being pregnant, became quiet and kind, as if, in her, body alone dictated mood.
She had no rational knowledge that she had conceived: only her body, setting
off on its forty-week journey, conveyed a general impression of contentment,
which the mind accepted.

 
          
Mabs
came downstairs, smiled at the children, and brought them all fish and chips,
and even lemonade to go with it.

 
          
The
doctor came up to Cadbury Farm presently to say that Debbie was to be sent off
to a convalescent home, and to take a general look around.

 
          
“Rather
them than me,” said Mabs. “She’s a dirty girl. She wets the bed. Still,” she
added magnanimously, “the others miss her.”

 
          
“You
nearly lost her altogether,” said the doctor.

 
          
“No,”
said Mabs, “I knew I wouldn’t.”

 
          
There
had been no signs after all—no owls hooting out of nowhere, no lightning out of
a clear sky, no yew brought into the house—no signs or portents. Only Mabs
twisting a pin in a wax image when she should have left it to others—enough to
damage and frighten but surely not to kill. Debbie had always been safe enough;
but how could she tell the doctor a thing like that?

 
          
“I’d
like to hear a little less about home remedies,” said the doctor, “and a little
more about visiting the surgery when anyone’s ill.”

 
          
“Albright,”
Mabs acquiesced. It was a genuine capitulation. She yawned. She was tired. It
occurred to her that Tucker and she were not as young as once they had been.

 
          
She
allowed the doctor to put Eddie on a course of antidepressants, and Audrey on
the pill, and herself on Valium to cure the rages she now admitted to, and
Tucker on vitamin B because he drank so much home-made cider. With every act of
consent, every acknowledgment of his power,
her own
waned. She felt it. She didn’t much mind.

 
          
Mabs
told the doctor that she and Tucker would fetch Liffey and the baby home from
hospital. They’d look after Liffey. Well, the husband had finally gone off.

 
          
Liffey’s
drips were removed. Her stitches came out.
Snip, snip—eight
times.
The skin that had stretched and smarted around the catgut resumed
its natural place. She could sit up now of her own accord. She could lie on her
back and lift her legs. She could do without the physiotherapist, who thumped her
hard from time to time to make her cough and clear her lungs. She could take a
bath, albeit on her hands and knees. She rang her mother, hardly knowing what
to say. Madge was cool but friendly and busy with a royal visitor to the
school.

 
          
Mrs.
Harris from the shop came to visit, and Audrey brought the curate, who saw
God’s hand in the deliverance of both Liffey and Debbie. The incident had even
reached the local paper. Audrey wished to be confirmed; he was undertaking it.
Mabs and Tucker came with flowers. Tucker wore collar and tie and sat on the
edge of his chair and seemed embarrassed by his surroundings, but he was robust
and solid and dignified— powerful, dark and male in a pale female world.

 
          
And
certainly as Mabs lost power, Tucker gained it. He knew it. He was rough with
Mabs now; he told her what to do, he shouted at her if she behaved badly to the
children.
He recognised
that she was deflated, that
although she still stared at the Tor, the clouds around its summit neither
reflected her will nor shadowed her intent. Her sly looks requested rather than
commanded, and he performed at his own pleasure, and not hers. He thought she
was a better
mother,
and high time too. As one set of
energies drained out of her, others took their place.

 
          
Richard
did not visit Liffey.

 
          
Richard, after a whole week’s absence,
unaccounted for and so far unexplained, went back to the office.

           
“Welcome back!” said Personnel.
“We’ll ask no questions and be told no lies. You have a fine son and Mother’s doing
well. Can we be of any help?”

 
          
“No,
thank you,” said Richard.

 
          
He
knew he had a son. His attention had been drawn to an advertisement in
The Times
that said, “Lee-Fox.
To Liffey and Tucker, a son.”
Miss Martin, Richard rightly
guessed, had inserted it. Miss Martin, as did everyone in the company, via
Vanessa’s connection with the director of the Canadian ox-tail soup television
commercial, knew all about the fathering of Liffey’s baby. Malice does not
evaporate: it bounces round like a rubber ball, striking here and there,
sometimes in the most unexpected places, gradually losing energy. It almost
stops. Then up it starts again—the cosmic ball of ill-will.

 
          
Richard
wangled Vanessa another modelling job so that she could buy a car for herself,
but after that left her alone. She had heard him weep: she would never respect
him. The battle, he could see, was to find a woman who would.

 
          
He
had spent the whole week with Vanessa. She had made him for a while believe
that his work was unimportant, that he was only money-grubbing in a rat race:
fortunately common sense reasserted itself. He wished to behave well towards
Liffey, to shame her with kindness, to continue to support her. For that he
would have to earn more. He owed it to his parents to get promotion, do well,
carry
on along the road on which they had first set his
stumbling footsteps. He could not fail Liffey or disappoint them.

 
          
When
he hated Liffey, it was because of the distress her behaviour would have given
his parents. He put off telling them. How was he to put it? Yes, Mother, Liffey
has her baby, but it is another man’s child. Not your grandchild. Not, after
all that, after all those years, your flesh and blood.

 
          
Ah
yes, I am sure.
So sure.
It explains so much. Why I
betrayed her. It was all her doing. Once the sacred tie is loosed, chaos
ensues; the forces of love, of trust and faith are in disarray: lust sweeps in.
Liffey loosed them quite deliberately. Untied the snowy white robe of her
purity and let Tucker in.

 
          
Mrs.
Lee-Fox senior telephoned.

 
          
“Darling,
what
is
happening? How’s lovely
Liffey?”

 
          
Lovely
Liffey had Tucker’s child, Mother.

 
          
Mrs.
Lee-Fox senior wept. See, Liffey, what you have done? My mother weeps. All my
life I have dreaded this minute, this moment. I knew it lurked somewhere,
waiting.

 
          
Liffey,
I hate you. I would kill you if I could.

 
          
Richard
went to stay with Bella and Ray. Bella still couldn’t get over the way Liffey
had behaved towards Tony and Tina.

 
          
“Not
even bothering to pack their homework!” said Bella. “Not even making them a
sandwich. They were dreadfully upset. I can’t help thinking you’re well out of
it, Richard.”

 
          
“Next
time choose someone who can cook,” said Ray. “Does that sound crude? But it’s
no good being romantic. You’re past the age of falling in love.” Ray had felt
infatuation for Karen, not love. Bella had explained it all. Ray was glad it
was over.

 
          
No
one has a baby alone. Every pregnant woman carries with her the aspirations,
the ambitions and the fears of others— friends, relatives, and passers-by—and
the good and ill wishes of such intensity as might put the sun right out.

 
          
As
Mabs’s ill wish evaporated, so
Liffey’s
good fortune returned. Or perhaps it was merely that now she carried the baby
in her arms, the ordinary up-and-downness of life returned.

 
          
Tucker
and Mabs brought Liffey home from hospital. Their car no longer reeked of
menace. It was an ordinary shabby, littered family car. The baby seemed to
enjoy the motion. Home was cosy and familiar. Mabs had put flowers in
vases,
Tucker had dug over the garden.

 
          
The
telephone had been installed.

 
          
There
was a pile of letters. One was from the bank to say that a final payment from
the trust fund had been paid in on her last birthday but had inadvertently not
been entered to her credit.
Twelve thousand pounds.
Another was from Mory and Helen. “Wonderful about the baby!” they wrote. “Just
to say the flat’s yours if you want it, even without the
£
1000 Richard couldn’t raise. Mory’s been offered a wonderful job
in
Trinidad
, and Helen can’t stand the British climate
any more. She’s pregnant.”

 
          
Cruel
Richard, thought Liffey.
Cruel, cruel Richard.
But she
did not want the flat back. She wanted very few now of the things she had
wanted before.

 
          
It
was a wonderful month for late sun and over-ripe roses. Liffey could take off
the baby’s clothes and let the sun get to his little chicken limbs.

 
          
The
telephone rang. Friends, who had seen the announcement in
The Times
and wanted to know what was going
on
.
Liffey told them. Liffey, they thought, was quite fun again.

 
          
Fortunately
no one who knew Tucker and Mabs read
The
Times,
so news of the announcement did not reach them. Personnel fired
Miss Martin, however. Enough was enough.

           
On Friday nights Liffey would find
herself nervous, wondering if Richard would come back—half wanting him to,
half not. She needed the full width of the double bed for herself and the baby,
rolling over in the night as he woke, to pick him from his crib and feed him.
Richard would have been in the way.

 
          
“What’s
his name?” people asked.

 
          
“Baby
Lee-Fox,” she said. She was waiting.

 
          
Madge
wrote out of the blue saying that the name of Liffey’s father had been Martin,
and in retrospect
he
had behaved well according to his
lights. They just weren’t Madge’s lights. Why didn’t Liffey call the baby
Martin?

 
          
She
called the baby Martin.

 
          
“After
his grandfather,” she told milkman, dustman,
postman
proudly. They all came up the drive now.

 
          
The
baby’s legs looked more human. He lay in his cot working rather than resting,
making sense of the world, recognising kindness, censorious of carelessness.

 
          
There
was a brief rain-sodden autumn. The last of the rose petals fell. A few last
blackberries stayed on the brambles. The days became cold and short.

 
          
Eddie
would come up with firewood; he liked to hang close by Liffey’s side. Audrey
came to talk about sex, and religion, and whether she preferred the vicar to
the curate, the former being older, wiser and richer, but married. Debbie,
though still pale and fragile, would trudge over the fields, unasked, to get
Liffey’s shopping. Liffey thought perhaps she was quite content with the
company of children.

 
          
Local
events became important in her life. Carol’s husband broke Dick Hubbard’s jaw
in a brawl and was sent to the local prison for two weeks to teach him what the
magistrates called a lesson. Carol did not visit him on visiting day but was
seen in the car park in Dick Hubbard’s car. Public opinion finally turned
against Dick Hubbard.

 
          
Mabs
laughed. She and Tucker drank a bottle of sherry between them. They let Audrey
have a sip. Mabs was pregnant; the price of beef was high, of foodstuffs not so
high as usual; one of the dogs had a puppy unexpectedly: they were happy.
Liffey lived in Honeycomb, properly subdued. It had taken them a year to
achieve it. Christmas was coming.