Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 Read online

  “Does your mother use puffballs?” Tucker asked Mabs.

  Mabs didn’t reply, and he knew he should not have asked. She liked to pretend that her mother was just like anyone else. But Tucker, as was only natural in the circumstances, would roll food around in his mouth before he swallowed, searching for strange tastes. Such knowledge passed from mother to daughter.

  “Puffballs are too nasty even for my mum,” said Mabs presently. “They’re the devil’s eyeballs.”

  “Isn’t it dark and poky!” said Mabs, pushing open the front door of Honeycomb Cottage. “I’d rather have a nice new bungalow any day. But the view’s good, I’ll say that.”

  Mabs waved at Glastonbury Tor, in a familiar kind of way, as she went inside. The sun was setting behind the hill in a bloodred sky.

  “I wonder if they’ll live like pigs,” said Mabs, “the way they act like pigs,” and she looked at Tucker slyly out of the corner of her eye so that he started grunting and waddling like a pig and pushed her with his belly into the corner and bore down upon her, laughing: and they made love in the red light that shone in diamonds through the latticed windows.

  “So she’s too skinny for you, is she,” said Mabs presently.

  “Yes,” said Tucker.

  “You might have to learn to like it,” said Mabs. “Just once or twice.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Tucker surprised.

  “It’s important to have a hold,” said Mabs. “You can’t be too careful with neighbours.”

  “You wouldn’t like it,” said Tucker. “Not one bit.”

  “I’m not the jealous type,” said Mabs. “You know that. Not if there’s something to be got out of it. I don’t mind things done on purpose. It’s things done by accident I don’t like.”

  They walked back hand in hand to Cadbury Farm. She was so large and slow, and he was so small and lively, they had to keep their hands locked to stay in pace with each other.

  The dogs in the courtyard barked, and Tucker kicked them.

  “They’re hungry,” Mabs protested.

  “A good watchdog is always hungry,” said Tucker. “That’s what makes it good.”

  The children were hungry as well, but Mabs reserved her sympathy for the dogs. Mabs had five children. The eldest, Audrey, was fourteen. The youngest, Kevin, was four. Mabs slapped small hands as they crept over the tabletop to steal crusts from the paste sandwiches she prepared for their tea. All her children were thin. Presently Mabs picked up a wooden spoon and used that as a cane, to save her own hand smarting as she slapped. One of the children gave a cry of pain.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” said Tucker, taking notice.

  “My children. I do as I please.” She did too, according to mood.

  “You’re too hard on them.”

  She said nothing.

  Her breasts were full and round beneath the old sweater.

  Tucker’s eyelids drooped in memory of them.

  “Get the bleeding sauce,” Mabs shouted at Eddie. Eddie was her third child, and irritated her most, and she slapped and shouted at him more than she did at the others. He took after her, being large and slow. She preferred her children to take after Tucker. The cruel audacity that in Mabs was almost attractive was in Eddie something nasty and sly. She had slapped and startled him too often: he lived in the expectation of sudden disaster and now cringed in corners. Nobody liked him. He was eight now, and it would be the same when he was eighty. Audrey, Mabs’s eldest, looked after him. She was kind where her mother was cruel, and clever at her books. Mabs took her books away because she put on airs.

  Mabs and Tucker ate fish fingers and tinned spaghetti. The children made do with the sandwiches.

  That night Mabs sat at the window and watched a sudden storm blow up over the Tor. Black clouds streamed out from it, like steam from a kettle, and formed into solid masses at the corners of the sky. Lightning leapt between the clouds. Thunder rumbled and rolled, but the rain did not start.

  “Come to bed,” said Tucker.

  “There are people in Honeycomb Cottage,” said Mabs. But Tucker couldn’t see them, although he came to stand beside her. Lightning lit up the interior of the rooms and made strange shapes that could have been anything.

  “What sort of people?” he asked cautiously.

  “Him and her,” said Mabs. “It won’t be long now.”

  “At it again are they?”

  “No,” said Mabs. “They were in opposite corners of the room. She was holding a baby.”

  “I know what’s the matter with you,” said Tucker. “You want another baby.”

  “No I don’t,” she said, but he knew she did. Her youngest child was four years old. Mabs liked to be pregnant. Tucker wondered how long it would be before she began to think it was his fault and what means she would find to punish him.

  “Come to bed,” he said, “and we’ll see what we can do.”

  It was a rare thing for him to ask. Usually she was there first, lying in wait, half inviting, half commanding, a channel for forces greater than herself. Come on, quick, again, again! Impregnate, fertilise. By your will, Tucker, which is only partly your will, set the forces of division and multiplication going. Now!

  Liffey Inside (3)

  Liffey was off the pill.

  Liffey’s pituitary gland was once more its own master and stimulated the production of oestrogen and progesterone as it saw fit, no longer by its inactivity, hoodwinking her body into believing it was pregnant. Liffey became a little thinner, her breasts a little smaller, her temperament a little more volatile. She was conscious of an increase in sexual desire, although she was still obliged to pretend for Richard’s sake and in the interest of her own self-esteem to have orgasms. Not that this affected her fertility, for orgasm and ovulation in the human female are not connected, as in other species they sometimes are. And although sexual desire itself can on occasion prompt ovulation, overriding the pituitary’s clock-work timing, the element of surprise that brings this rare phenomenon about (and much distress to rape victims and deflowered virgins) was not present in Richard’s love-making with Liffey.

  Liffey’s menstrual cycle was thus quickly restored to its normal rhythm. Liffey, all the same, did not become pregnant.

  Two more lunar months went by. Two more ova dropped, decayed and were disposed of.

  Liffey’s chance of becoming pregnant, which was 95 per cent when she was a teenager, was by now down by some 6 per cent, and would continue to diminish slightly year by year, as would Richard’s, until at the time he was sixty his fertility rate would be down by 90 per cent, and hers of course would be nil.

  In their favour, both were still young: intercourse occurred at least four times a week, and Richard’s sperms were almost always present in the outer part of Liffey’s Fallopian tubes, waiting for ovulation to occur. Against them was the fact that Richard had flu in November and his sperm count was perhaps temporarily rather low, and Liffey had only just come off the pill. There were the many other statistical probabilities of conception to take into account. Had Liffey known all this, she would perhaps not have lain awake at night fearing—for although she did not want a baby, she certainly did not want to be infertile—that she was barren and that some cosmic punishment had been visited upon her.

  It was a matter of time, nothing else, before she conceived.

  In-Laws and Secretaries

  Liffey’s mother, Madge, was a lean, hard-drinking, prematurely white-haired teacher of chemistry in a girls’ school in East Anglia. She had never married, or wished to marry, and Liffey was not so much a love child as a gesture of defiance to a straitlaced world. Madge had thought to bear a warrior son but had given birth to Liffey instead, and Liffey had compounded the error by attempting throughout her childhood to chirrup and charm her way into Madge’s affections.

  Madge, hearing that Liffey was trying to have a baby, commented then to a friend, “Silence for six months and then this. Not that she’s pregnant, not that sh
e’s miscarried—-just that she’s trying to have a baby. How’s that for a piece of non-news?” “I expect she thought it would please you,” said the friend, who was there only for the whisky.

  “It doesn’t,” said Madge. “Liffey is an only child and an only grandchild. Nature is clearly trying to breed the line out. Trust Liffey to interfere with the proper course of things.”

  Madge did not want Liffey to be pregnant. She did not want to think of herself diluting down through the generations. She craved mortality.

  Richard’s father, on the other hand, living in early retirement in a fisherman’s cottage in Cornwall, was glad to think that his line might well continue now that Liffey was off the pill. Richard’s mother was made nervous by the news—as if some trouble, pacing for years behind at a steady distance, had suddenly broken into a jog and overtaken her. She started knitting at once, but there was a tenseness in her hands and the nylon wool cut into her fingers.

  The Lee-Foxes looked a placid enough couple—well-heeled, grey-haired, conventional and companionable—but the effort to appear so cost them a good deal in nervous energy.

  He had ulcers, she migraines.

  “It’s too early to start knitting,” said Mr. Lee-Fox. “She’s not even pregnant, they’re just trying.”

  “Richard always does what he sets out to do,” said Mrs. Lee- Fox loyally.

  “Your fingers are bleeding,” said Mr. Lee-Fox. “Whatever is the matter?”

  She wept for answer.

  “Little garments,” said Mr. Lee-Fox in wonder, “stained by blood and tears!”

  Mr. Lee-Fox could not understand, why, having worked hard to achieve a reasonable home and a happy life and having done so at last, troubles should still keep occurring. It was his wife’s fault, he concluded. She was discontented by nature. He hoped, for his son Richard’s sake, that Liffey was not the same.

  “You mustn’t worry,” he said. “Liffey will come through with flying colours. Wait and see.”

  Liffey was at the time extremely discontented, which made her more loving and lively than ever. Chirruping and charming. Sometimes, when she woke up in the apartment, opening her eyes to the concrete wall of the house next door and hearing the sound of traffic instead of the sound of birds, she thought she was a child again and in her mother’s house.

  The trouble was that Richard, telephoning Dick Hubbard, the estate agent, about Honeycomb Cottage, had been told that the cottage was for sale, and not to rent, and Richard had said they could not afford it.

  “We could spend some of my money,” said Liffey.

  “No, we couldn’t,” said Richard firmly. “I’m not going to live off you. What kind of man would that make me?”

  By mutual consent, throughout their marriage, Liffey’s money had been used to buy small things, not large things. Confiserie, as it were, but not the matrimonial home.

  “Then let’s sell this place and buy that.”

  “No. It isn’t ours to sell.”

  The apartment had been a wedding gift from Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Fox. Disapproving of Liffey as a bride for Richard, they had sacrificed their own comfort and security and spent an inordinate amount on the present. Thus they hoped both to disguise their feelings and remain securely sealed in the ranks of the happy and blessed.

  When Richard came home from his boarding school bruised and stunned, victim of bullying, they would seem not to notice. “Such a wonderful school,” they’d say to friends. “He’s so happy there.”

  Liffey searched the newspapers for cottages to rent but found nothing. Another month passed, another egg dropped and failed. Liffey bled; Richard frowned, perplexed.

  Liffey took a temporary job in a solicitor’s office. The quality of her cooking deteriorated. She served Richard burnt food, and tossed and turned all night, keeping him awake. She did not know she did it, but do it she did. She had come off the pill, after all, and still they lived in London.

  “If Liffey can’t have children,” asked Annie, Richard’s secretary, “would you stick by her?”

  “Of course,” said Richard immediately and stoutly. But the question increased his anxiety.

  Annie read cookery books in her lunch hour, propping them in her electric typewriter. She took an easy and familiar approach to her job and felt no deference towards anyone. She had spent a year working in the States and had lost—or so it seemed to Richard—her sense of the nuances of respect owing between man and woman, powerful and humble, employer and employed.

  Her fair hair hung over the typewriter like a veil. She had a boyfriend who was a diamond merchant and one-time bodyguard to General Dayan. She had wide blue eyes and a rounded figure. Liffey had never seen her. Once she asked Richard what Annie looked like—tentatively, because she did not want to sound possessive or jealous.

  “Fat,” said Richard.

  And because Annie had a flat nasal telephone voice, Liffey had assumed she was one of the plain, efficient girls whom large organisations are obliged to employ to make up for the pretty ones they like to keep up front.

  Besides.

  When Richard and Liffey married they had agreed to tell each other at once if some new emotional or physical involvement seemed likely, and Liffey believed the agreement still held.

  Christmas approached, and Liffey stopped work in order to concentrate upon it and decorate the Christmas tree properly. She had her gifts bought by the second week in December and then spent another week wrapping and adorning. She was asked to Richard’s office party but didn’t go. She did not like office parties. Everyone looked so ugly, except Richard, and everyone got drunk.

  Liffey arranged to meet Richard at a restaurant after the party. She expected him at nine. By ten he had not arrived, so she went round to the office, in case he had had too much to drink or there had been an accident. In no sense, as she explained and explained afterwards, was she spying on him.

  The office was a massive new concrete block, with a marble- lined lobby and decorative lifts. Richard’s employers were an international company, recently diversified from oil into films and food products—the latter being Richard’s diversion, and he a junior assistant brand manager. If it were not for Liffey’s private income, she would certainly have had to work and earn, or else live very poorly indeed. As it was, lack of financial anxiety made Richard bold in his decisions and confident in his approach to his superiors, which was duly noted and appreciated and boded well for his future.

  Liffey went up in the lift to Richard’s office, walking through empty corridors still rich with the after-party haze of cigarette smoke and the aroma from a hundred half-empty glasses. From behind the occasional closed door came a cry or a giggle or a moan. Liffey found Richard behind his desk, on the floor with Annie, who was not one of the plain ones after all, just plump and luscious, and all but naked, except for veils of hair. So was Richard.

  Liffey went home by taxi. Richard followed after. He was maudlin drunk, sick on the step, and passed out in the hall. Liffey dragged him to bed, undressed his stubborn body and left him alone. She sat at the window staring out at the street.

  She felt that she was destroyed. Everything was finished— love, trust, marriage, happiness. All over.

  But of course it was not. Richard’s contrition was wonderful to behold. He begged forgiveness, he held Liffey’s hand. He pleaded, with some justification, total amnesia of the event. Someone had poured vodka into the fruit cup. It was Annie’s fault, if anyone’s. Richard Loved Liffey, only Liffey. Love flowed between them again, lubricating Liffey’s passages, promoting spermatogenesis in Richard’s testes, encouraging the easy flow of seminal fluid from seminal vesicles and prostate to the entrance of the urethra, and thence, by a series of rhythmic muscular contractions, into Liffey.

  Love, and none the worse for all that, but earthly love. Spiritual love, the love of God for man and man for God, cannot be debased, as can earthly love, by such description.

  Still Liffey did not get pregnant.

  An
nie was transferred to another office. After the annual Christmas party there was a general shifting round of secretarial staff. A stolid and respectful girl, Miss Martin, took Annie’s place. Her plumpness was not soft and natural, as was Annie’s, but solid and unwelcoming and encased by elasticised garments. Her face was impassive and her manner was prim; Richard was not attracted to her at all, and was relieved to find he was not. He had lately been having trouble with sudden upsurges of sexual interest in the most inappropriate people. He confided as much to Bella.

  “For heaven’s sake,” said Bella, “you can’t be expected to stay faithful to one person all your life just because you married them.” Richard quite disliked Bella for a time for giving voice to what he saw as cheap and easy cynicism. He still believed in romantic love and was ashamed of his lapse with Annie, his sudden succumbing to animal lust. He decided that Liffey and he would see less of Bella and Ray.

  Christmas Pledges

  Liffey’s birthday was on Christmas Day, a fact that annoyed Madge, who was a proselytizing atheist.

  They were to spend Christmas with Richard’s parents. They journeyed down to Cornwall on the night of Christmas Eve: there was a hard frost; the night landscape sparkled under the moon. Richard and Liffey were drunk with love and Richard’s remorse. The back of the car was piled high with presents, beautifully wrapped and ribboned. They took with them a thermos of good real coffee, laced with brandy, and chicken sandwiches. They went by the A 303, down past Windsor, on to the motorway, leaving at the Hungerford exit, and down through Berkshire and Wiltshire, crossing Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge stood in the moonlight, ominous and amazing, dwarfing its wire palisade. Then on into Somerset, past Glastonbury Tor, into Devon, and finally over the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall.