Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 Read online

  The veins in her white, smooth legs swelled slightly, but they too were young and strong and did not become varicose. The clotting mechanism of her blood altered, predisposing her to thrombo-embolic disease. But Liffey, which was the main thing, would not become pregnant. Liffey valued her freedom and her figure, and when older friends warned her that marriage must grow out of its early love affair and into bricks and mortar and children, she dismissed their vision of the world as gloomy.

  Was Liffey’s resentment of Richard a matter of pressure in her brain caused by undue retention of fluid, or in fact the result of his behaviour? Liffey naturally assumed it was the latter. It is not pleasant for a young woman to believe that her behaviour is dictated by her chemistry and that her wrongs lie in herself and not in others’ bad behaviour.

  Holding Back

  The next weekend Liffey and Richard took their friends Bella and Ray down to visit Honeycomb Cottage.

  The trap closed tighter.

  “When I say country,’’ said Richard, to everyone, “I mean twenty miles outside London at the most. Somerset is impossible. But as a country cottage, it’s a humdinger.’’ He had a slightly old-fashioned vocabulary.

  Richard was, Bella always felt, a slightly old-fashioned young man. She wanted to loosen him up. She felt there was a wickedness beneath the veneer of well-bred niceness and that it was Liffey’s fault it remained so firmly battened down.

  “When I say have a baby,’’ said Liffey, “I mean soon, very soon. Not quite now.’’

  Ray had a theory that wives always made themselves a degree less interesting than their husbands, and that Liffey, if married to, say, himself, would improve remarkably.

  Bella and Ray were in their early forties, and their friendship with Richard and Liffey was a matter of some speculation to Bella and Ray’s other friends. Perhaps Bella was after Richard, or Ray after Liffey? Perhaps they aimed for foursomes? Or perhaps—the most common consensus—Bella and Ray were just so dreadful they had to find their friends where best they could, and choice did not enter into it.

  Bella and Ray—who wrote cookery columns and cookery books—were a couple other couples loved to hate. Liffey and Richard, however, such was their youth and simplicity, accepted Ray and Bella as they were—liked, admired and trusted them, and were flattered by their attention.

  Ray and Bella had two children. Bella had waited until her mid-thirties to have them, by which time her fame and fortune were secure.

  When Bella and Ray saw the cottage they knew at once it was not for them to admire or linger by. Its sweetness embarrassed them. Their taste ran to starker places: they would feel ridiculous under a thatch, with roses round their door. They rather unceremoniously left Richard and Liffey at the gate and borrowed the car and went off to the ruins of Glastonbury to inspect the Monks’ Kitchen with a view to a Special on medieval cookery.

  “Richard,” said Liffey. “The main-line station’s only ten minutes by car, and there’s a fast early train at seven in the morning that gets you in to London by half-past eight, and a fast one back at night so you’d be home by half-past seven, and that’s only half an hour later than you get home now.”

  The Tor was distant today, swathed in mists, so that it rose as if from a white sea. And indeed the surrounding plains, the levels, had once been marsh and sea until drained by monks to provide pasture.

  “I want to live here, Richard,” said Liffey. “If we live here I’ll come off the pill.”

  Richard nodded. He opened Liffey’s handbag and took out her little packet of contraceptive pills. “I don’t understand why someone who likes things to be natural,” he said, “could ever rely on anything so unnatural as these.”

  Richard took Liffey round to the field at the back and threw her pills, with some ceremony, into the stream, which recent rain had made to flow fast and free.

  “I wonder what he’s throwing away,” said Mabs watching through the glasses.

  “So long as it’s nothing as will harm the cows,” said Tucker. “They drink that water.”

  “Told you they’d be back,” said Mabs.

  And Mabs and Tucker had a discussion as to whether it was in their best interests to have Richard and Liffey renting the cottage, and decided that it was, so long as they rented and didn’t buy. An outright purchaser would soon discover that the two-acre field on the far side of the stream belonged to the cottage and not, as Tucker pretended, to Cadbury Farm. Tucker found it convenient to graze his cows there but would not find it convenient to pay for grazing rights.

  “You tell your sister to tell Dick Hubbard to keep his mouth shut about the stream field,” said Tucker.

  Dick Hubbard was the estate agent responsible for Honeycomb Cottage, with whom Mabs’s sister Carol was having an affair. Dick Hubbard was not married, but Carol was. Mabs disapproved of the relationship and did not like Tucker mentioning it. Many things these days Mabs did not like. She did not like being forty any more than the next woman did; she was beginning to fear, for one reason and another, that she was infertile. She was, in general, suffering from a feeling she could only describe as “upset”—a wavering of purpose from day to day. And she did not like it.

  “He’ll keep it shut of his own accord,” said Mabs.

  Something about Liffey upset her even more: the arrogant turn of her head as she sat in the car waiting for Tucker’s cows to pass, the slight condescension in the smile, the way she leaned against Richard as if she owned him, the way she coupled with him—as she was doing now—in the open air, like an animal. Mabs felt that Liffey had everything too easy. Mabs felt that, rightly, Liffey had nothing to do in the world but enjoy herself and that Liffey should be taken down a peg or two.

  “Nice to have a new neighbor,” said Mabs comfortingly, and Tucker looked at her suspiciously.

  “I wouldn’t fancy it down in the grass,” said Mabs. “That stream’s downright unhealthy, and nasty things grow there at this time of year.”

  “You won’t mind when I swell up like a balloon?” Liffey was saying to Richard.

  “I’ll love you all the more,” said Richard. “I think pregnant women are beautiful. Soft and rounded and female.”

  She lay on his chest, her bare breasts cool to his skin. He felt her limbs stiffen and grow tense before she cried out, her voice sharp with horror. “Look! What are they? Richard!”

  Giant puffballs had pushed up out of the ground a yard or so from where they lay. How could she not have noticed them before? Three white globes, giant mushroom balls, each the size and shape of a human skull, thinly skinned in yellowy white, stood blindly sentinel. Liffey was on her feet, shuddering and aghast.

  “They’re only puffballs,” said Richard. “Nature’s bounty. They come up overnight. What’s the matter with you?”

  The matter was that the smooth round swelling of the fungus made Liffey think of a belly swollen by pregnancy, and she said so. Richard found another one, but its growth had been stunted by tangled conch-grass, and its surface was convoluted, brownish and rubbery.

  “This one looks like a brain in some laboratory jar,” said Richard.

  He and I, thought Liffey, trembling, as if aware that the invisible bird of disaster, flying by, had glanced them with its wings. He and I.

  Bella and Ray came round from the back of the house.

  “We knew we’d find you round here,” said Ray. “Bella took a bet on it. ‘They’ll be at it again,’ she said. I think she’s jealous. What have you found?”

  “Puffballs,” said Richard.

  “Puffballs!”

  “Puffballs!”

  Ray and Bella, animated, ran forward to see.

  Liffey saw them all of a sudden with cold eyes, in clear sunlight, and knew that they were grotesque. Bella’s lank hair was tightly pulled back, and her nose was bulbous and her long neck was scrawny and her eyes popped as if the doll-maker had failed to press them properly into the mould. Her tired breasts pushed sadly into her white T-shirt: the ski
n on her arms was coarse and slack. Ray was white in the bright sunlight, pale and puffy and rheumy. He wore jeans and an open shirt as if he were a young man, but he wasn’t. A pendant hung round his neck and nestled in grey, wiry, unhuman hairs. In the city, running across busy streets, jumping in and out of taxis, opening food from the Take Away, they seemed ordinary enough. Put them against a background of growing green, under a clear sky, and you could see how strange they were.

  “You simply have to take the cottage,” said Bella, “if only to bring us puffballs. Have you any idea how rare they are?”

  “What do you do with them?” asked Liffey.

  “Eat them,” said Ray, “Slice them, grill them, stuff them— they have a wonderful creamy texture, like just ripe Camem- bert. We’ll do some tonight under the roast beef.”

  “I don’t like Camembert,” was all Liffey could think of to say.

  Ray bent and plucked one of the puffballs from its base, fingers gently cupping its globe from beneath, careful not to break the taut, stretched skin. He handed it to Bella and picked a second.

  Tucker came along the other side of the stream. Cows followed him: black-and-white Friesians, full bumping bellies swaying from side to side. A dog brought up the rear. It was a quiet, orderly procession.

  “Oh my God,” said Bella. “Cows!”

  “They won’t hurt you,” said Liffey.

  “Cows kill four people a year in this country,” said Bella, who always had a statistic to back up a fear.

  “Afternoon,” said Tucker amiably, across the stream.

  “We’re not on your land?” enquired Ray.

  “Not mine,” said Tucker. “That’s no one’s you’re on—that’s waiting for an owner.”

  He was splashing through the water towards them. “You thinking of taking it? Good piece of land, your side of the stream, better than mine this side.”

  He was across. He saw the remaining puffball. He drew back his leg and kicked it, and it burst, as if it had been under amazing tension, into myriad pieces, which buzzed through the air like^a maddened insect crowd, and then settled on the ground and were still.

  He or I, thought Liffey. But just at the moment Tucker kicked she felt a pain in her middle, so she knew it was she, and was glad, in her nice way, that Richard was saved. Her tummy, his brain. Well, better kicked to death by a farmer than sliced and cooked under roast beef by Bella and Ray.

  “If you want to spread the spores,” said Ray to Tucker, “that’s the best way.”

  “Disgusting things,” said Tucker. “No use for anything except footballs.”

  He told them the name of the estate agent who dealt with the property and left, well pleased with himself. His cows munched solemnly on, on the other side of the brook, bulky and soft- eyed.

  “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.

  Liffey Inside (2)

  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.

  Mothe
rs

  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.