‘You didn’t go to church, then?’ enquired Tucker.

  ‘We’re not really believers,’ said Liffey.

  Tucker looked amazed.

  ‘Somebody had to make it all,’ said Tucker.

  While their elders talked about the weather, crops, and cider apples, Audrey wandered and Eddie leaned, and fidgeted. They were not like Tony and Tina. They did not believe the adult world was anything to do with them.

  Audrey wore platform heels, three years out of date, a short skirt, holed stockings, and a shiny green jumper stretched over breasts which would soon be as robust as her mother’s. Her large eyes followed Liffey, making Liffey nervous, but sometimes she would look sideways at Richard, and smile. She sidled round the perimeter of the room, as if her natural habitat were out of doors.

  Eddie leaned against the wall, and shuffled from foot to foot, and fidgeted. His face was pale and puffy, his little eyes were sad, he had cold sores round his mouth, and coarse stringy hair. If Audrey looked as if she were biding her time, Eddie, at the age of eight, looked as if his had run out. His nose dripped a thick yellow mucus, which from time to time he would sniff back up his nostrils.

  Eddie, fidgeting and fumbling, pushed a glass ashtray from a shelf and broke it.

  Slap, went his father’s hand across his cheek, and slap again.

  ‘Oh don’t!’ cried Liffey and Richard in horrified chorus.

  ‘Oh don’t! It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘He’s got to learn,’ said Tucker, surprised, slapping again. Eddie snivelled rather than cried: as if life, already despaired of, was now merely continuing on a slightly more disagreeable level.

  Liffey, half horrified, half fascinated, by this exercise of power, of parent over child, strong over weak, raised her eyes and found Tucker looking straight at her.

  Tucker hadn’t forgotten. She knew he would be back.

  Liffey retreated to the kitchen to make real lemonade for the children, from whole chopped lemons, blended and then strained, and sweetened with honey. Audrey followed her in.

  Audrey spoke.

  ‘I’ve had nothing to eat all day,’ she said, ‘and won’t till the end of it, that’s according to my Mum. I was cooking bacon and eggs for all our breakfast, the way she told me, but then she changed her mind and made me make the beds and when I came back breakfast was cold, and I said don’t make me eat that I’ll be sick, but she did make me, so I ate it, and then of course I threw up over everything and she made me wipe it up and then she made me go to my room but my Dad made her let me out.’

  Liffey did not believe Audrey. Mabs loved children and wanted more. She often said so.

  ‘Would you like a sandwich?’ Liffey asked, all the same, but Audrey refused, having taken a look at the brown wholemeal bread. ‘I only like white sliced,’ she explained, and then, as if in apology, ‘You be careful of my Mum. She’s got it in for you. You only see the side of her she wants you to see. You don’t know what she’s like.’

  It was a clear warning, and Liffey disregarded it. Nobody nice, ordinary and well-meaning wishes to believe that they have enemies, let alone become the focal point of energies they do not understand. Liffey had assumed a discretion and secrecy in Tucker that did not exist: and that Mabs could have instigated the seduction did not even occur to her and that the same convulsions which animate a mindless cluster of single cells—of division and multiplication within, and incorporation and extrojection along the outside perimeter—apply to the whole of existence, from galaxies to groups of human beings, she did not know. She could not see the dance of the Universe, although she was part of it.

  ‘You’ll feel better about your mum tomorrow,’ said Liffey, and offered Audrey some of her lemonade, but Audrey, preferring the bottled kind, only distantly related to the lemon, declined to drink.

  Richard went back to London. Liffey waited for Tucker to call, and was relieved when he did not. She locked the door at night, and was placating towards Mabs, whose bulky figure she would see, at odd times of the day, trudging over the fields, making Liffey feel both secure and anxious. On Thursday Liffey expected her period to start, but it did not. Her pituitary gland, out of its accustomed season, was producing extra progesterone: too much for menstruation to begin. The inner surface of Liffey’s uterus had, in general, become highly secretive and active, and thus would continue until the end of her pregnancy, whether this ran to term or otherwise.

  A week passed. Two weeks. Richard came and went. They agreed that they loved each other and that a little absence made the heart grow fonder, and that there were things about the Universe which could be learned singly, and which could not be learned together. That these things included, for Richard, sexual knowledge, did not occur to Liffey. He gave an account of his days which included Bella and Miss Martin, and she knew that Bella was old and his best friend’s wife, and that Miss Martin was stodgy and plain, and why should he anyway, since he had her, Liffey, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights—on a good weekend—were three nights out of seven.

  Liffey dug the garden. Dick Hubbard came over to inspect the roof and told Liffey not to bother with the garden since the soil was so poor it was a waste of time. There were prowlers about, and the local prison was where they sent sexual offenders and the security was shocking and there were always break-outs, hushed up of course, and Honeycomb Cottage was on the direct escape route, over the fields, from the prison to the main road.

  But Liffey, who wished to harm no one, feared no harm. Mabs came over with seeds for the garden and talked of the prison working parties too, describing the prisoners as without exception harmless and amiable.

  Liffey started a compost heap, having read that artificial fertilisers were the ruin of the soil. Richard scoffed, and marvelled at his wife’s capacity of handling what to him was better churned up as quickly as possible in a waste disposal unit. Mory and Helen failed to answer solicitor’s letters, pay rent, or answer the door when Richard knocked upon it.

  Illegal, his solicitors said, to knock down your own front door.

  Wait, wait.

  The other side of the door Lally’s pains came and went. Her legs swelled. Spots swam before her eyes, and she had headaches.

  ‘You don’t think I should call a doctor?’ she would sometimes say, plaintively. But Helen said no, doctors would only interfere with the course of nature.

  ‘I think the baby’s overdue,’ Lally ventured one morning. The flat was almost bare of furniture now. Bedding could not be burned, conveniently, as it filled the rooms with a choking smoke.

  ‘How can a baby be overdue?’ asked Helen. ‘When a baby’s due it comes out,’ and Lally was obliged to admit that that was so. Helen was her elder sister, and had known best from the beginning.

  Neither Mory nor Roy liked to interfere. Helen had a determined and positive nature: once given over to the winning of Pony Club rosettes and hockey colours; since her conversion equally determined to bring about the New Society. She smoked less than the others, as they smoked more and more, which gave her, if only by default, definite qualities of leadership.

  ‘I suppose the wicked weed doesn’t do the baby any harm,’ murmured Mory.

  ‘It stops me feeling the pains,’ said Lally, who had never at the best of times been prepared to sacrifice comfort and entertainment in the dubious interests of the baby (‘all these dos and don’ts are just punitive—part of the male plot to make the pregnant woman miserable’—Helen) and at the moment felt happiest in a stupor.

  The apartment became increasingly damp, dirty and uncomfortable. Helen declined to make Roy’s coffee, Lally could not, and Mory did not. There was no cooked food, and Roy felt bad without at least one dish of meat, potatoes and vegetables a day. He started doing sums on pieces of paper, and concluded that he could not be the father of Lally’s child and moved out, taking Helen’s amber beads and all their supply of marijuana with him. Helen wept: Lally groaned and started to haemorrhage. Mory ran into the street and stopped a police car who called an ambulance. Lally was taken to hospital where the next day the baby was stillborn, of placental insufficiency, the baby being six weeks beyond term.

  ‘Liars, murderers,’ sobbed Helen. ‘You should never have called them in, Mory.’

  But he had lost his faith in her, and threw about a great deal of Liffey’s blue and white Victorian china.

  Lally went back to stay with her mother, ‘Just for a time,’ she said.

  ‘Traitor,’ stormed Helen. ‘Don’t give her my love, whatever you do.’ The doctors said that Lally’s fertility might be henceforth somewhat impaired, but Lally did not mind, at least for the moment.

  The bank wrote another letter to Liffey, and Mory and Helen failed to pass it on. But Mory made telephone calls to Argentina, in the weeks before the Telephone Company acted on Richard’s instructions to disconnect the telephone, where he had heard of a job, and where truly creative architects, artists in concrete, were appreciated. Helen said it was an impossibly reactionary and oppressive society, and they were not going to such a place, not even for a week, and Mory said he was, he didn’t care about her.

  Still Liffey’s period did not begin. Three weeks late! She felt a little queasy and put it down to some vague virus infection: and was sick one morning, and her breasts were tender—but so they often were just before a period—and she had to get up in the night to pass water, but put this down to a chill on the bladder.

  No, no, thought Liffey, I can’t be pregnant. Not this month. Not while Tucker might be remotely connected with the event. Which surely he wasn’t, because surely—

  Liffey discovered she knew next to nothing about pregnancy, or what went on inside her, and really had no particular wish to know. It is hard to believe that the cool, smooth, finished perfection of young skin covers up such a bloody, pulpy, incoherent, surging mass of pulsing organs within: hard to link up spirit to body, mind to matter, ourselves to others, others to everything. But there it is, and here we are. Hearts beating, minds running; fuel in, energy out.

  Liffey, trembling on the edge of a train of thought which would both enhance and yet debase her, make her ordinary where she had thought herself special, special where she had believed herself ordinary, was pushed by guilt and trepidation to go into Poldyke and buy the one paperback book on pregnancy that they had in stock.

  News quickly got back to Mabs.

  Mabs stood and stared at the Tor. It was very cold that day, and deathly still. The cows stopped rustling in the fields and the birds waited in the trees. Tucker stayed out of the house and sent the children to Mabs’ mother.

  ‘No reason to think it’s mine,’ said Tucker, to the trees.

  To Mabs, Tucker said, ‘Just because she’s bought a book, doesn’t mean she is.’

  But Mabs did not reply, and both knew, as surely as one knows a death before it’s verified, that Liffey was indeed pregnant.

  Liffey wondered: Mabs and Tucker knew.

  Everything Mabs felt, but gave no voice to, partly because she scorned to, partly because she did not have a vocabulary to express the complexity of the things she felt: fear of ageing, fear of death, loss of father, fear of mother, hate of sister, resentment of her children (who, once born, were not what she had meant at all), jealousy of Tucker, sexual desire towards other women, pretty women, helpless women; resentment of women who spread their possessions, their homes, delicately around them and stood back in pride: envy of brainy women, stylish women, rich women, women who could explain their lives in words: all these things Mabs felt, surging up in a great wordless storm, on knowing that Liffey was pregnant.

  She, Mabs, could stump about the fields, and put her powerful hands before her, and spread her fingers wide, and the whole power of the Universe would dart through them—but what use was that to Mabs? It could not make her what she wanted to be.

  Mabs, pregnant, felt the fury of her unconscious passions allayed, and could be almost happy. And, so, pregnant, became ordinary, like anyone else, and used her hands to cook, and clean, and sew, and soothe, and not as psychic conductors.

  Mabs knew, too, that there are only so many babies to go round, and that if Liffey was pregnant, she would not be.

  Mabs thought all these things, and since she could not voice them, then forget them; she knew only that she liked Liffey even less than before, and that the answer to her dislike was not to keep out of Liffey’s way. No.

  The air grew warmer: the cows rustled in the fields; the birds found the courage to leave the trees and look for food in the thawing ground: clouds passed easily over and around the Tor.

  Tucker fetched the children back. Tucker liked the idea of Liffey being pregnant. It was as if Mabs had barred the light of the world, eclipsing it, and suddenly he could see round her, and all this time she had been hiding wonderful things.

  Liffey was in her fifth week of pregnancy. The baby was two millimetres long, and lay within a newly formed amniotic sac. Its backbone was now beginning to form.

  Liffey felt her tender breasts, and thought no, no, surely not. She was not ready to have a baby. She had not grown out of her own childhood: a baby was something which would grow at her expense: which would diminish her: which would bring her nearer death. It seemed bizarre, not natural at all.

  She said nothing about it when Richard came home the next weekend. And he told her that he thought Bella was a repressed lesbian, and that Miss Martin had announced her engagement in the local papers, and they both laughed a little, but kindly, at the hypocrisies of the one and the modest aspirations of the other.

  ‘As for Helga,’ said Richard, ‘she’s the original Hausfrau! The three Ks. Kirche, Küche, Kinder. I thought women like that went out with the dinosaur. Of course she’s the size of one.’

  But Richard’s shirts were clean and ironed, and he brought no washing home for Liffey. She was glad of that. She was feeling a little tired.

  She felt an increase in her sexual desire for Richard. She wished to try new positions, but Richard seemed embarrassed so she quickly desisted, marvelling at herself. It was as if her body, no longer needing to insist on procreation, had at last found time for its own amusement. Richard went back to London on Sunday night. She hoped her conduct in bed had not driven him away early.

  On the Monday morning Liffey was sick, and on the Monday afternoon went into Crossley and bought, with some embarrassment, a pregnancy testing kit and by Tuesday midday, having dropped some early-morning urine into a phial, adding the provided chemicals, and putting it to set, soon knew that she was pregnant.

  A certain elation began to mingle with her fear. The sick feeling, which might have been brought on by anxiety, and uncertainty, lessened a little.

  Liffey went round to Mabs.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘Can I use the telephone to ring Richard?’

  ‘But that’s wonderful!’ cried Mabs, and insisted that they open a bottle of blackberry wine to celebrate, and delayed Liffey getting to the telephone until well after one o’clock, by which time Richard had gone to lunch.

  Or so Miss Martin said. In actual fact Richard had just kissed her gently on the eyes, to kiss away her tears, and she had had to break away from his embrace to answer the telephone. The tears had come after a full office week in which Richard had ignored her except for sending letters back for re-typing and reproving her in front of other people: she thought, she hoped, that the cause of his unkindness was her having announced her engagement to Jeff, but how could she be sure? She knew that tears irritated him, but by Tuesday lunchtime could no longer hold them back.

  And instead of shouting, he kissed her.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Richard.

  ‘It was only your wife,’ said Miss Martin, and he had to stop himself from striking her. Only Liffey! He knew that Jeff, poor Jeff, would end up beating her. She invited it, mingling tears with acts of hostility.

  ‘But it was your lunchhour,’ Miss Martin put in her feeble excuse. ‘You said you didn’t want to be disturbed in your lunchhour.’

  He made her ring back Cadbury Farm, and get Liffey on the line. But Mabs answered. Her broad accent rang thick and strange in the quiet office.

  ‘Your Liffey’s here tippling with me,’ said Mabs, ‘and she’s got something important to tell you. She’s pregnant.’

  There was silence. Mabs had the receiver away from her ear. ‘I’ll bet that shook him,’ she said, aside to Liffey.

  Liffey took the phone. There were tears in her eyes. She felt that a moment had gone, lost, never to be recaptured. It was one in which she might have lost her fear of having the baby, and in Richard’s spontaneous pleasure learned how to accept it.