Puffball. Fay Weldon

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 which 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!

       Inside Liffey (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 clockwork timing, the element of surprise which brings this rare phenomenon about (and much distress to rape victims and deflowered virgins) was not present in Richard’s lovemaking 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 ninety-five per cent when she was a teenager, was by now down by some six per cent and would continue to diminish, slightly, year by year, as would Richard’s, until by the time he was sixty his fertility rate would be down by ninety 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, nor wished to, 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 she’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 only there 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 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 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. Confectionery as it were, but not the matrimonial home.

      

      ‘Then let’s sell this place and buy that.’

      ‘No. It isn’t ours to sell.’