Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 Page 10

  “You didn’t put anything in that wine, I hope,” said Tucker to Mabs.

  “Why should I do a thing like that?” asked Mabs. ‘None of that stuff works in any case. Or only on people who’re stupid enough to believe in it.”

  “You can’t change people,” said Audrey, Mabs’s oldest daughter, listening when she had no business to. “But you can make them more themselves.”

  “What do you know about it, miss?” Mabs was angry and surprised that one of her children should have a view of the world and contribute it to the household.

  “Only what Gran tells me,” said Audrey, putting a table between herself and Mabs. She had her father’s protection, but that only made her the more nervous of her mother.

  Mabs looked at Audrey and saw that all of a sudden she was a young woman with rounded hips and a bosom, and Mabs’s raised fist fell as she felt for the first time the power of the growing daughter, sapping the erotic strength of the mother. She was quiet for a time, and felt the more pleased, presently, that she had dosed Liffey to keep her off Tucker and Tucker off her, and dosed Richard so that he should pay Liffey out properly while away during the week, and hoped again that she herself was pregnant and still young.

  Solitude

  During the next week the wind turned to the north and rattled through the cottage windows, and the sky was grey and heavy, and the Tor hidden by cloud and mist.

  Liffey cleaned and painted and patched and repaired by day, and shivered by night. She came to know the pattern of wind and rain around the house as she lay in bed listening, hearing the wainscot rustle with mice, and the thatch with restless birds, and further away the hoot of an owl or the bark of a fox, and when all these noises for once were stilled, the tone shifted in the silence itself, as if the night were breathing. Once she heard music, faintly, on the wind, and was surprised to remember that the night world had people in it too.

  Liffey was lonely.

  Liffey admitted defeat in her heart, and that she had been wrong, and not known what she had wanted, like a child, and not cared what Richard had wanted, like an unhappy child: and wanted Richard back the sooner to apologise. As soon as Mory and Helen were disposed of, she would join Richard in London.

  Liffey walked to the Poldyke pub one evening in search of companionship and the host of friendly young couples whom she had come to believe inhabited every corner of the world, but found instead only old men drinking cider who stared at her in an unfriendly way. She walked back home in the dark, stumbling and groping, without a torch, having forgotten how black the night could be. Wet trees behind her whispered and gathered.

  Liffey was frightened.

  Mabs came up once or twice for coffee and a chat, and Liffey was grateful.

  Liffey wrote a change-of-address letter to her mother. It did not mention loneliness or fear, merely hopes fulfilled and desires gratified. She had always found it difficult and dangerous to confide in her mother, and was accustomed to prattling on instead, filling silence as now she filled the space on the page. Madge read the letter and recognised its insincerity and screwed it up and put it in the fire and thereafter had no record of her daughter’s new address.

  Liffey walked to the telephone box at Poldyke to call friends, but once there lacked the courage to put in coins and speak. It seemed as if she were having to pay for friendship, and she was humiliated. She walked home over the icy stubble of the fields, and in the shadow of herself that the low sun cast in front of her perceived a truth about herself.

  She was someone shadowy, inhabiting a world of shadows. She had not allowed the world to be real. She had been accustomed to sitting beside a telephone and summoning friends up out of nothingness, dialling them into existence, consigning them to oblivion again, putting the receiver down when they had served their purpose. She had no friends. How could she have friends, who had never really believed that other people were real? It was her punishment.

  And if Mory and Helen were real, not cut-out figures set up by Liffey in the play of her life, to flail about for a time in front of paper sets, then perhaps they could not be manoeuvred and manipulated: perhaps they could not be got rid of.

  Liffey cried.

  She wondered whether Richard was real, and whether she wanted him to be real. Her life since she had left her mother’s house had been a dream. And still her mother would not write to her. Perhaps, thought Liffey, I am as unreal to my mother as everyone except her is unreal to me. A child might very well seem unreal to the mother. Something dreamed up, clothed in flesh and blood, which sucked and gnawed and depleted.

  Liffey cried some more.

  The north wind grew stronger and came through the missing roof tiles in sudden cold gusts.

  Liffey walked to Poldyke again and made herself telephone friends and talk and invite them down, but they were all too busy to talk much, or thought the winter too cold to come and stay, and though all were polite and friendly, Liffey sensed the displeasure of those who remain, towards the one who has wilfully absented himself: and marvelled at how out of sight could so quickly become out of mind, not from carelessness or malice but from a desire to preserve self-esteem.

  Liffey ran out of butter and walked all the way into Poldyke again, and saw six tins of loganberries on Mrs. Harris’s shelf, and loving tinned loganberries, bought all six, thus leaving none for Mrs. Harris’s other customers and nearly breaking her arm as she carried loganberries and butter back.

  Liffey thought, I must get back to civilisation quickly.

  Liffey rang Richard from Cadbury Farm to tell him all these things, but Miss Martin, who answered, said Richard was in a meeting, and would not fetch him out of it.

  The grey sky groaned and heaved: dark, lonely days drifted into darker, lonely nights. Liffey wanted Richard again. She dreamed he was making love to her and she cried when she woke.

  There was no sign of Tucker.

  Inside Liffey (4)

  Although all was not well without, all was very well within. Liffey’s uterus had settled down nicely after its recent state of confusion. It lay like an inverted pear, settling upon the upper end of her vagina, narrowing into the cervical canal, finished off (where in a pear the stalk would be) by the cervix itself. This, on a good day, could be detected by Richard’s engorged penis as a hard knob, and by a doctor’s hand as a firm, dome-shaped structure. The walls of Liffey’s uterus were some half an inch thick and composed of a whole network of muscles, some up and down, some oblique, some spiral, all extraordinarily flexible, and all involuntary—that is, uncontrollable by the conscious Liffey. The blood supply, simple, ample, and good, came from the main blood vessels in Liffey’s pelvis; and the nerve supply, anything but simple, enabling as it did the muscles to contract rhythmically during menstruation and more dramatically during labour, would only send messages of discomfort when uncomfortably stretched. These nerves could be cut or burned or ulcerated and Liffey would be none the wiser.

  Now, as the fifty-first of Liffey’s potential ova for the month ripened, the walls of the uterus lined themselves richly and healthily in preparation for its fall and fertilisation. Liffey’s Fallopian tubes (the pair of ducts attached to the outer corners of the uterus) waited too, secreting from their own mucous membrane the substances that nourished all visiting sperm and, more rarely, any fertilised ovum. Of the four hundred million sperms that Tucker had released into Liffey the week before, on the sixth day of her cycle, some forty million had reached her cervical canal, but only a few dozen had survived the quick, forty-five-minute journey up the uterus and along the Fallopian tube. Here, in spite of the warm, sugary, gently alkaline environment that did its best to preserve and nurture them— and Tucker’s were good strong sperm—all had inevitably perished, since no ovum arrived within the forty-eight hours of their life span. All died, but surely, surely, some molecular vestige of Tucker remained within Liffey?

  One way or another, like it or not, we are part of more people than we imagine: one flesh.

&nb
sp; Be that as it may, on the fourteenth day of Liffey’s cycle, now nicely re-established at twenty-eight days, an ovum released by Liffey’s left ovary, and swept up by the fimbriae, the little fingers of tissue existing where the Fallopian tubes curl round to meet the ovary, swam into the healthy canal of the tube itself.

  Ins and Outs

  Liffey knew nothing of all this. She gave these matters even less attention than a car driver might give to his car. All she knew was that it was Friday night and that she was looking forward to Richard’s return, that dinner was cooked, candles lit, and everything in order. She wore a swirly skirt, a blouse instead of a T-shirt, and scent. Everything in fact was ready and prepared—an outer symbol of an inward state.

  In the conscious and the unconscious world alike, this is the pattern. Things are made ready, offerings are prepared, fulfilment is hoped for, and sometimes occurs. The cosmic soup prepares for life; birds prepare nests, men prepare for war, wombs prepare linings, priests are prepared for ordination. Friday washing and ironing prepares for Saturday Sabbath. It was not surprising, then, that Liffey prepared for Richard and found pleasure in it.

  Things get ready, then burst into life. Nature, like its subsidiary processes of love and friendship and learning, proceeds by halts and starts.

  Reverently, Richard made love to Liffey. She found him gentler and more considerate than ever, and although this should have gratified her, she found it oddly irritating.

  Richard was not gentle with Bella, nor had been with the motorway whore he had picked up on the journey away from Liffey, back to London, the previous Sunday night. They were the users-up of surplus seed, not of intended seed; they were instruments of his anger, inasmuch as a man who has conscientiously decided to respect and adore his wife, to project rather than to incorporate his resentment of her, must find something to do with his anger, and the erect penis can be used to punish and destroy as well as to love and create. So can soft words.

  These were the five women Richard had made love to since his adolescence. Mary Taylor, a forty-year-old barmaid, whose habit and pleasure it was to seduce sixth-form boys from the local boarding school.

  Liffey, his wife.

  His secretary, on the occasion of a drunken office party.

  Bella Nash, his friend and landlady and best friend’s wife.

  Debbie, a fifteen-year-old delinquent who travelled the motorways.

  His encounter with Debbie of the unknown last name, precipitated by fate and the emotional tumult brought about by sudden self-knowledge—or else by a physical irritation induced by Mabs’s mistletoe and Mayflower—and his on the whole unvoiced resentment of Liffey’s recent behaviour, had gratified and satisfied him. To use, pay, and forget a more than willing girl hurt, so far as he could see, no one. It did not interfere with his uxorious love of Liffey, his more complex and imaginative lust for Bella, or his work.

  If Richard was saddened by anything, it was by the new knowledge of years of sexual opportunity lost—a common enough sadness in those whom circumstance or conditioning have prevented from making full use of youthful sexuality.

  Richard resolved that while he could he would, that Liffey’s living in the country, though adventitious, would in the end help them both. It would help him, Richard, to know himself, and by knowing himself, to love her, Liffey, better, and in the end, surely, as they both grew older, to love and want Liffey alone. He could see fidelity as something to be travelled towards, achieved in the end; and the journey there could surely be made as varied and exciting as possible.

  Mabs, the while, lay in bed with Tucker and laughed out loud.

  “Now what?” He was nervous.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel things are going the way I want.”

  “Up at Honeycomb Cottage?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Leave them alone,” he begged. He should never have let himself be pushed by her, right into Liffey. She’d done it to him before, once, with a former schoolfriend she’d come to envy.

  “That Angie,” Mabs had deplored with sudden savagery, “what’s she got to be so stuck up about anyway?” And Tucker had been sent over before Angie’s big wedding, and Angie had ended up with an arm mangled in a hopper, and a drunk for a husband, and one single stone-deaf child, big wedding or not. It was as if he, Tucker, had been sent in to prepare the way: make an entry through which Mabs could pour ill wishes.

  But these were night thoughts. In the morning, he knew, Mabs would be just another farmer’s wife, in Wellingtons and head scarf.

  He rolled over her, as he could feel her needing, as he knew controlled her, if only for a while. Mabs was a sweep of forested hill, of underground rivers and hidden caves, and dark graves and secret powers. Liffey was a will-tree, all above ground. He liked Liffey. He would do what he could to protect her.

  Well, thought Liffey, lying there, revered by Richard, at least he loves me. He won’t get into trouble in London. For she saw now that sexual opportunity is more powerful than sexual discrimination, and that by and large those who can, will, and there was Richard, by himself in London all week, and a young and handsome man, although of course Bella would keep an eye on him for her—and what’s more, it had all been her doing.

  “I miss you and love you,” said Richard as they lay together, wind and rain swirling around the chimneys outside, snug and warm beneath a hundred-per-cent-eiderdown quilt from Heals —and it was true. He missed her and loved her. She was his wife.

  She missed and loved him. He was her husband.

  Inside Liffey (5)

  Meanwhile some forty million of Richard’s sperm were starting their migration from the vault of Liffey’s vagina to the outer part of her Fallopian tubes. Her orgasm, or lack of it, made no difference to their chance of survival. The sperms had been formed in the testicles suspended in the scrotum beneath Richard’s penis. Here too the male hormone testosterone was formed. Richard’s testicles produced perhaps a little less than average of that particular hormone, rendering him in general kind and unaggressive, not given to using force to solve his problems, and needing to shave only once a day, not twice —but not so little that he did not berate Mory over the telephone and feel the better for it. It was some months since Richard’s sperm had been so plentiful.

  The electric blanket he and Liffey loved, and which now Mory and Helen delighted in, had overheated his testicles, and together with the tight underpants Liffey so admired, had overheated and overconstricted his testicles, thus causing a degree of infertility. But now, deprived of the electric blanket, wearing more comfortable pants, the sweat glands of his scrotum were once again able to maintain the testicles at their correct temperature and enable spermatogenesis to occur. The sperms, once produced, were stored in the slightly alkaline, gelatinous fluid produced by his prostate gland, which lay at the base of the bladder at the root of the penis.

  Richard ejaculated four millilitres of seminal fluid, each containing one hundred million sperm, well within the normal sperm count (which can vary between fifty and two hundred million sperms per millilitre and be ejaculated in quantities between three and five millilitres). Each sperm was about one-twenty-fourth of a millimetre long and consisted of head, neck and tail. The head of the sperm contained the chromosomes required to fertilise the ovum. The neck contained the mechanism that moved the tail. The tail propelled the sperm forward, at a rate of one millimetre every ten seconds—not bad going for an organism so very small. If it came up against a solid object it would change direction, like a child’s mechanical toy. So doing, a sperm would even get by a cervical cap, or the vinegar-soaked sponge Liffey’s grandmother used to trust before she had Madge. Liffey’s cervical canal was that day receptive and benign to Richard’s sperm: the mucus there, mid-cycle, had become transparent and less viscous than normal. As the hours passed, so the sperm moved, readily and more plentifully than Tucker’s before them, up into Liffey’s Fallopian tube.

  Conception

  Saturd
ay morning came, and lunchtime, and then it was time for supper.

  Mabs suddenly and unexpectedly leaned forward and slapped Eddie for slurping his tea. He cried. She slapped him again and snatched away his bacon and baked beans. All the children snivelled. They were having a late tea. Earlier Tucker had taken Mabs to the pictures.

  “What’s the matter with you, then?” asked Tucker. “Can’t you just leave the children be?”

  But she couldn’t. Something had gone wrong. She knew it had.

  Baked beans fell from Mabs’s fork on to her tweed skirt. Audrey ran for a damp cloth.

  “Little creepy crawler,” said Mabs to Audrey, but she took the offered cloth, and darted Tucker an evil, glinting look as she wiped, as if it was all his fault. He knew she was thinking about Liffey.

  “You sent me up there,” said Tucker. “It was what you wanted.”

  Mabs strode about the kitchen, her face distorted. Tucker nodded sideways to the children, who slipped away quickly.

  “Calm down,” said Tucker. He was frightened, not knowing which way Mabs’s anger was to turn. Mabs stood at the window and looked at the Tor, and he could have sworn that as she did, the clouds that hung above it swirled and churned in the moonlight.

  “How funny the clouds look above the Tor,” said Richard to Liffey. They stood side by side on the stairs, leaning into each other dreamily.

  “They often look funny,” said Liffey. “It quite frightens me sometimes. But it’s just air-currents.”

  Richard’s sperm, now in Liffey’s left Fallopian tube, had there encountered a fully fledged ovum, some five hours old and in good shape. By virtue of the enzymes that they carried en masse, they liquified the gelatinous material that encases the ovum, enabling one of their number to penetrate the ovum wall, running into it head first, leaving its tail outside.