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 circumstances 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 him, 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 headscarf.

  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 willow-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 moreover the tight underpants Liffey so admired had overconstricted the overheated 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 alkali, 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 which 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

  Saturday 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’ 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’ 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 liquefied the gelatinous material that encased the ovum, enabling one of their number to penetrate the ovum wall, running into it head first, leaving its tail outside.

  And there, Liffey was pregnant.

  ‘I do love you,’ lied Richard.

  ‘I love you,’ said Liffey.

  ‘Calm down,’ said Tucker to Mabs, once again, and surprisingly, she calmed down. She moved away from the window. ‘It’s her I blame,’ said Mabs, smiling at Tucker, ‘not you. Did she wear a bra?’

  ‘No,’ said Tucker.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Mabs, as if that explained everything. And then, ‘What’s bad news for some is good news for another.’ It was something she often said, and her mother too. Dick would say it to Carol, sometimes, referring to Carol’s husband Barry, as a counterpoint to their lovemaking, making Carol laugh.

  ‘Tucker,’ said Mabs. ‘What size shoe does she wear?’

  ‘Little. Three or four, I should say.’

  Mabs looked down at her own large feet and sighed. She scraped all the children’s teas into the pig-bin, yelled down the corridor for them to get to bed, and she and Tucker went to their bedroom together, like an ordinary couple, and she not at all hooked up to the hot lines of the Universe.

  Inside Liffey (6)

  Liffey slept. The female nuclei of the ovum and the male nuclei of the sperm, each containing the chromosomes which were to endow her child with its hereditary characteristics, both moved towards the centre of the ovum, where they fused to form a single nucleus. The nucleus divided into two parts, each containing an equal portion of Liffey and Richard’s chromosomes. Liffey’s brown eyes: Richard’s square chin. Her gran’s temper: his great grandfather’s musical bent. And so on.

  That was Friday night. By Sunday night, as they listened to Vivaldi on Richard’s cassette player and toasted their toes by the wood fire, the two cells had divided to make four, eight, sixteen—by early Monday morning, when Richard left for London there were sixty-four, and could be termed a morula. The process was to continue for another 263 days; and 266 days from the time of conception, when the specialisation of different tissues was complete—some that could see, others that could hear; some to breathe, others to digest, stretch, retract, secrete; some to think, others to feel, and so on—and then when all were ready a baby would be delivered, weighing seven pounds or so. If Liffey’s nature and physique were such that she would not abort the child, by accident or on purpose, or die from the many hazards of pregnancy; if Richard’s were such that he could protect it until it was grown; if the combination of genes that formed the child allowed it health and wit enough to survive—a naked, feeble creature in a cold world, with only mews and smiles to help it—and then fulfil its designed purpose and itself procreate, successfully—the human race would be one infinitesimal step forward.

  Nature works by waste. Those that survive are indeed strong, but not necessarily happy. Auntie Evolution; Mother Nature; bitches both!

  Inside Richard’s Office

  Offices do, for some, instead of families: and for others, more prudent, as a useful supplement to them. Bosses are as parents, subordinates as offspring, and colleagues as siblings. For entertainment there is the continuing soap opera lives which brush past each other, seldom colliding, seldom hurting.

  It does not do, of course, to mistake office life for real life. For if a desk is emptied one day by reason of death, or redundancy, or resignation, or transfer, it is filled the next, and the waters close over the departed, as if they had never been. In offices no one is indispensable; in real life people are.

  Mother dies, and is gone for good. The Personnel Officer dies, to be reborn tomorrow.

  It does not do, either, to mistake office sex for real sex, least of all carry the fantasy into the outside world. Secretaries marry bosses, it is true, but must remain secretary and boss for the rest of their lives, hardly man and wife. He parental: she childish. And colleague may marry colleague, but the quality of comradeship inherent in the match, of fraternal common sense and friendliness, keep them for ever like brother and sister, hardly man and wife.

  Miss Martin was in love with Richard. Why should she not be? He was young, he was pleasant, he was good-looking, he was forbidden; above all he was there. He had come to confide in her. She was sorry for him too, regarding Liffey as a bad wife, who could not even consult a railway timetable accurately, and who rang the office at inconvenient times, distracting Richard when he most needed to concentrate, intruding and interfering in a world which was none of her business.

  Miss Martin knew that hers was a hopeless love. She could place herself quite accurately in the world. She was sensible, but dull. She had a solid, pear-shaped figure which no amount of dieting would make lissom. She preferred to serve rather than be served. She was deserving, so would never get what she deserved. She did not understand her fiancé Jeff’s regard for her, and rather despised him for it. If he loved her, who was not worth loving, how could she love him? He seemed lively and handsome enough now, but would soon settle down, and be as dull and plain as she was.

  Miss Martin, in fact, following the death of her father, was in a sulk which might well last her whole life. She was consumed by spite against the Universe, which had spited her, and taken away the object of her love. She would find no joy in it. The determination glazed her eyes, dulled her hair and skin.

  In the meantime, Richard would do to be in love with. The passion, being forbidden and unrequited, would serve as its own punishment. It made her heart beat faster when he came into the room, and her hand tremble when she handed him his coffee, and her typing perfect, and her loyalty fierce. It was a secret love. It had to be. It would embarrass Richard to know about it. The love of the socially and physically inferior is not welcome, especially if the object of the love is male. Miss Martin, in other words, knew her place.

  She knew it, as it transpired, better than he did.

  On Monday Richard arrived in the office, and hung his coat upon the hook provided. (Later, Miss Martin would rearrange it, so that it hung in more graceful folds.) She had waiting for him upon his desk a list of the day’s appointments. There was mud upon his shoes, and she tactfully remarked upon it, so he could attend to it before encountering his boss.

  ‘That’s country life,’ said Richard. ‘All mud and stress. But Liffey loves it. Have you ever lived in the country, Miss Martin?’

  ‘I’m a suburban sort of person,’ she replied. ‘Neither one thing nor the other.’

  ‘I need a nail file,’ he remarked, and she provided it. She did not find these attentions to his physical needs in any way humiliating. They set him free to attend to matters which by common consent were important—the making of the decisions which kept them all employed. She could have made the decisions as well as he, of course, but nobody would then have believed they were important, let alone difficult.

  Messengers came, telephones rang and files were circulated. Currently obsessing Richard’s department was the maximising of the salt content of a particular brand of chicken soup, and the growing conviction that some kinds of salt acted saltier than others, a fact verifiable by common experience, but not scientific experiment. Pleasing the public palate is not easy.

  ‘Of course Liffey would have everyone keeping their own chickens and boiling them down for soup,’ said Richard. ‘She’s not a great one for packets.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have the heart,’ said Miss Martin. ‘Poor chicken!’

  Before lunch Richard took out an unlabelled bottle of white wine.

  ‘All this talk of salt has made me thirsty,’ he said. ‘Will you have some, Miss Martin? It’s home-made. A neighbour of ours made it. Mayflower. It’s supposed to be unlucky for women to drink it, and Liffey won’t, but you’re not superstitious, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Martin, drinking too. Richard noticed the stolid fleshiness of her behind as she bent to a filing cabinet, and found himself rather admiring it. Liffey’s buttocks proclaimed themselves to the world, moving in open invitation, cheek by cheek beneath tight jeans. Miss Martin had something to hide. But what? He took another glass.

  ‘I love you,’ said Miss Martin, two glasses later. The love induced by the mistletoe, parsley, and mystery ingredients in the wine was of an elemental, imperative kind, and overrode inhibitions induced by low self-esteem.

  Richard flinched, as if physically assaulted, but quickly recovered. Miss Martin was an excellent secretary, he liked her, and for some reason pitied her, as he pitied certain kinds of dogs, who look at humans with yearning eyes, as if able to conceive of humanness, but know they can never aspire to it, and are doomed to creep on four legs for ever.

  ‘That’s just the wine talking,’ said Richard more truly than he knew. ‘You’d better not have any more.’ But he poured her another glass, even as he spoke.

  ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t love you,’ complained Miss Martin. ‘No skin off your nose.’

  ‘Well,’ said Richard, ‘since it’s sex that makes the world go round—’

  Miss Martin felt argumentative. She often did, but was accustomed to keeping her arguments to herself.

  ‘I’m not talking about sex,’ she said, ‘I’m talking about love.’

  ‘You’re only not talking about sex,’ said Richard, ‘because I suspect you know nothing about it.’

  ‘I’m a virgin,’ she said.

  Miss Martin rang up the colleague with whom Richard was supposed to be lunching, and said he had been delayed by a crisis, and they went off to lunch together, oblivious to those who saw them. He strode on long, cheerful legs, and she trotted alongside on her little dumpy ones. It wasn’t right. He was a kestrel; she was a sparrow doomed to pick at leavings. In nature everyone knows their place.

  Mabs would have been pleased at the un-rightness brought about by her mother’s potion, and would certainly have thought it served Miss Martin right. Mayflower wine is unlucky for women to drink, and she had been warned.