Puffball. Fay Weldon

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 which would promote the formation of a corpus luteum which would secrete progresterone 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 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’ eyes flickered as Liffey winced, but that too could be coincidence.

       Mothers

      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’ 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—as her mother’s before her—were the same as the local doctor had to offer: psychoactive agents, prophylactics, antiseptics, narcotics, hypnotics, anaesthetics and antibiotics. 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.

      

      ‘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 blood red 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 one another.

      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 the others. He took after her, being large and slow. She preferred her children to take after Tucker. That cruel audacity which 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’ 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