Tucker was out. But Mabs was in the kitchen, watching television. She took a long time deciding what to do: whether to wait for Tucker or call the vet, and then finally came herself, pulling on a long pair of rubber gloves. Together they set off back up the lane. Liffey wanted to go back inside the cottage but Mabs wouldn’t let her.

  ‘Why don’t you watch? It’s always nice to watch animals being born.’

  But it wasn’t. The calf was dead when Mabs pulled it out by its emergent leg, tugging and grunting, while the cow lowed and moaned. When the calf’s head came out, it was putrid; pulpy and liqueous. Then the cow heaved and groaned and died.

  ‘Three hundred pounds down the drain,’ said Mabs, furious. ‘At least she wasn’t a good milker or it would have been nearer four.’

  And she left cow and calf lying there, and walked back to the cottage with Liffey. Liffey composed herself as best she could: she felt sick and wanted to sleep, but Mabs wanted to talk, it seemed.

  ‘So you’re going through with your baby,’ Mabs said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Liffey, surprised.

  ‘I’d have thought you’d have waited until you and your Richard are more settled.’

  ‘Why?’

  Mabs just shrugged, and Liffey felt, for once, wary, and as if forces she was not quite in control of were abroad, and dangerous. Supposing what happened to the calf happened to her baby? She wished she had not seen it.

  Liffey feared the contagion of ill-fortune, as pregnant women do. Oh, show me no bad sights: sing me no harsh songs: let good fairies only cluster around the baby’s cradle.

  ‘Nothing to a termination these days,’ said Mabs. ‘Girls I know have it done in order to get away on holiday in peace. They don’t mind a bit, up at the hospital. Funny thing, that cow that just died. Her fourth calf, and still something can go wrong. We mostly lose them first time round. Just like people. First babies are always the trickiest. Longer labours, that’s what does it.’

  Liffey folded her mind around the baby, to guard it. ‘I couldn’t possibly have a termination,’ said Liffey.

  Mabs did not like the firmness of Liffey’s response. Liffey’s baby, she began to feel, might be harder to get rid of than she had imagined. She felt it more and more acutely as the supplanter of her own, product of some process set up by Tucker and so stolen from her: she despised Liffey for a fool; she despised the baby for choosing where it had to grow. She smiled warmly at Liffey, dispelling most of Liffey’s doubts, but not all. Liffey, for once, had noticed Mabs’ ill-will.

  ‘You’d better get up to the doctor soon,’ said Mabs. ‘You look a little peaky.’

  ‘I’ll wait a bit,’ said Liffey, and spoke gently, and smiled, as people do when they sense danger, and know better than to aggravate it, and went inside her cottage.

  Mabs stood, still in bloodied rubber gloves and thick muddied Wellingtons, and stared after her for a little, and then moved off towards Cadbury Farm.

  The lane was very, very old. The hedges were so high that in summer they would form a tunnel of green. Earthworks and barrows stood at the summit of the hill above the Cottage. Here the people of the Bronze Ages had lived, and died, worked their magic and honoured their dead, until the Iron Age invaders had arrived, and driven them out, and lived off a past which was none of their own. Once messengers had hurried up and down the lane, with good news and more often bad, and mothers, at their coming, had clutched their children to them, and fathers wondered how to turn ploughshares into swords, and stood there wondering too long.

  Liffey stood in the kitchen and watched Mabs plod away, and wondered why she was afraid, and realised, of course, it was the dead calf and the dying cow which had upset her. Unreasonable to blame Mabs for what was Nature’s fault.

  At about the same time as Liffey witnessed the death of the cow, Richard was obliged to rescue the Nashs’ cat from the gutter, where a passing car had flung it to die. In the end he could not nerve himself to pick the animal up, fancying its dead eye was glaring at him, and while he was hesitating Helga, with alarming speed, came running out of the house, scooped the remains up into a plastic bag and dumped them into the dustbin, and got back to her cleaning as if nothing had happened. Richard was sick.

  Liffey rang her mother and told her the news.

  ‘I suppose you know what you’re doing,’ said Madge. ‘Is it what you want?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Madge, disconcertingly.

  ‘I suppose because it’s natural,’ said Liffey, brightly.

  ‘So are varicose veins,’ said Madge.

  ‘It’s not as if I had a career,’ said Liffey tentatively, over the crackling line to her mother far away. ‘It’s not as if I was good at anything else. I might as well use up my time having a baby. I might even be a born mother.’ ‘Not if you take after me,’ said Madge, which might almost have counted as an apology. ‘Aren’t you too frightened? You know what you’re like about pain.’

  Liffey realised at that moment that she would never, ever, receive her mother’s whole-hearted approval. Marks would be given, but marks would always be taken away. Six out of ten for overcoming cowardice: three out of ten for indulging her own nature and having a baby: and there she was, with an average four-and-a-half out of ten, when a pass-mark to mother’s love was five.

  So we live, as daughters; and, as mothers, are astonished that we elicit the same sad anxiety from our progeny. It was not how we meant it to be, when we dandled them on our knees.

  ‘So you’re having a baby in the country,’ said Madge, ‘while

  Richard works in London. Is that wise?’

  ‘It’s what has to be,’ said Liffey. ‘Not what I want. As soon as Richard gets Mory and Helen out of the apartment we’ll be together again.’

  ‘You could afford something else,’ said Madge. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  Liffey did not want to hear the note of relish in the mother’s voice when she explained about the money; she put it off. ‘I like it down here,’ said Liffey, and a ray of sun broke through the clouds, and she knew that it was true. Only that some danger lay across the land like a sword.

  Madge hiccuped on the other end of the line, and Liffey wondered if she were drunk again, and along with the dreary everyday feeling that she had failed to live up to her mother’s expectation of her, there now travelled another strand, sharply painful: of anxiety for her mother’s welfare. The fear of the child, back from school, whose footstep hesitates at the gate of the house, wondering what’s to be found within. Liffey remembered that, too. Her heart beat faster: her hand trembled: tears started in her eyes. ‘It’s all right,’ said the baby, suddenly and unexpectedly.

  ‘All that is past. Be calm, be still.’

  And Liffey was, and Mabs, listening in on the extension, knowing only what was available to her to know, wondered why the tone of her voice changed.

  ‘Why don’t you come down and stay?’ asked Liffey. ‘It’s going to be so lovely now spring is coming.’

  ‘I was never one for nature,’ said Madge, presently, cautiously, ‘or for family either. But I suppose it is the kind of thing a mother is expected to do. Once you’re given a label you never escape it. I’ll come down presently if I can find the time.’

  Liffey, to be hung for a sheep as well as a lamb, telephoned Richard’s parents.

  ‘A baby!’ cried Mrs Lee-Fox, ‘how wonderful.’ But in her voice Liffey could hear shock and despair. Now Richard and Liffey were married for good, for ever: they had joined not as children join, for fun and games, but as man and wife, together, as parents, to face trouble and hard times. Mrs Lee-Fox was in danger of losing her son.

  Liffey wondered if she had always heard the other voice, the tone that lies behind the words and betrays them: and if she had heard, why she had not listened? Perhaps she listened now with the baby’s budding ears? And certainly this disagreeable acuity of hearing diminished within a week or two: perhaps because Liffey could not for long endure her new sensitivity to the ifs and buts in Richard’s voice when he assured her he loved her: perhaps because the matter of hearing was, once properly established, less in the air so far as the baby was concerned.

  Mrs Lee-Fox handed Liffey over to Mr Lee-Fox, who repeated his wife’s enthusiasm, and the phone, following a misunderstanding as to who was actually to talk to whom, went down rather abruptly. Liffey did not telephone back.

  Mabs put down the extension and called Liffey into the kitchen for a cup of tea.

  Later in the week Mabs sent Tucker up with some new-laid eggs from her hens. Tucker smiled at Liffey in a friendly and ordinary manner, and did not outstay his cup of tea and biscuit.

  Liffey used two of the eggs for breakfast the following day. On the mornings she did not feel sick, she felt extremely hungry: with a kind of devouring, non-selective hunger, as if already feeling the need to stock up now for hard times ahead. This was one of the hungry mornings, when she was glad Richard was not about to witness her greed.

  The first egg plopped perfectly out of its shell into the pan: the ball of orange yolk held firmly in a strong white. The second fell out in a runny, smelly, thin flow, yolk and white already mingled, leaving the inside of the shell stained a yellowy green, and spread across the bottom of the pan with unbelievable speed, so that the first egg was contaminated.

  Liffey’s heart beat: her hand flew to her mouth. She knew beyond doubt that Mabs had sent a message of ill-will. Her earlier doubt of Mabs had been transitory: had been washed away by civility, smiles and cups of tea. And as Richard had pointed out, to ask a barely pregnant woman to witness the delivery of a dead calf may be tactless, but can hardly be called a conspiracy. And he had laughed, and Liffey had tried, and managed, to laugh too.

  The reasonable part of Liffey told her that she was being absurd, that an addled egg sent by a neighbour is a mistake, not an attack; she assured herself that Mabs had no reason to dislike her, that what had passed between her and Tucker was over, secret, and of no consequence; and that Mabs was truly the friend she seemed. The other unreasonable part of Liffey cried out in wild alarm, and would not be pacified. Her sins would find her out.

  Liffey was not accustomed to being unfaithful. She did not suffer, as did many of her married women friends, from sudden overwhelming sexual passions for this inappropriate person or that. She was not practised, as they were, in the arts of forgetting, and self-justification and mendacity. Liffey tried to forget, and could not. She tried to justify and failed. She wanted to tell Richard, but the longer the time that passed between the event and the confession, the more difficult that became: and the more occasions on which she and Richard, Mabs and Tucker were in the same room, sharing the same conversation, the same meal, the more implicit deceit there must be in her silence, and the more difficult it was to break.

  It came to Liffey that she and Mabs were linked, through Tucker, in the mind, in a more compelling and complex way than ever she and Tucker had been in the flesh. It flitted through her consciousness that this was perhaps what Mabs had intended, but so fleetingly the notion did not take root, did not settle, did not open itself up for contemplation. Liffey continued to feel uneasy, as people do, when clues are offered, and in the interests of peace of mind and self-respect, ignored.

  Liffey walked to Poldyke and rang Richard from the phone box there; and Miss Martin graciously allowed them to speak.

  ‘Richard,’ said Liffey, ‘do you think Mabs could be a witch?’

  Now Richard was in a meeting with a marketing man who wanted money to set up a feasibility study on the subject of community salinity centres, which he, Richard, could not recommend. When Liffey asked her question he already felt much practised in patience, and answered politely and quietly.

  ‘No, Liffey, I don’t. What are your reasons for suggesting it?’

  ‘She sent up some rotten eggs this morning, saying they were fresh.’

  ‘Liffey,’ said Richard, reasonably, ‘it is hard, even for a farmer’s wife, to know what is going on inside an egg.’

  Liffey accepted Richard’s version of events; she was a stay-at-home wife: she had already begun to believe he knew best. She looked at the weather from out of her window: he journeyed into strange places, and knew many things, and understood them all. ‘If you don’t mind, Liffey,’ he said, ‘I am rather busy,’ so she put the telephone down, and he reproved Miss Martin mildly for putting through a telephone call while he was in a meeting. Miss Martin wept secretly because he had reproved her, but her heart leapt at this rebuff of Liffey. Perhaps, she thought, he was at last beginning to see Liffey for what she was. Foolish, empty and useless.

  Carol, in the telephone exchange, dialled through to Mabs to report.

  Later in the morning Mabs came up to Liffey and said she did hope the eggs had been all right; one of the hens had been laying outside the nesting box and Audrey had found the cache and not told her until after Tucker had come up with them.

  Mabs smiled and chatted about husbands and elm trees and babies and said it was high time Liffey went to see the doctor, wasn’t it, and Liffey agreed, and realised she was being silly about Mabs, who was a good friend, just sometimes tactless.

  ‘What was all that about witches?’ asked Richard at the weekend.

  ‘Just a silly idea,’ said Liffey. ‘One gets silly ideas when pregnant.’

  Mabs asked them over for supper.

  ‘Let’s not go,’ said Liffey. ‘We haven’t really got all that much in common.’

  But Richard wanted to go.

  ‘You wanted to live in the country,’ said Richard. ‘I would have thought you could find plenty in common. It’s not as if you were the greatest intellect in the world, Liffey.’

  He had come home on Friday, resisting the temptation to stay over with Bella for a smoked salmon festival, because he had been a little worried by his brief and surprising exchange with Liffey on the telephone. Now, since she seemed perfectly well and cheerful, he resented having made the sacrifice. He found it difficult to wind down on Friday evenings; he found himself looking round for people to confide in, or chivvy, or engage in argument or sexual provocation, while Liffey wanted him to sit quietly and stroke her hair, as if they were some still life of a young married couple: by Saturday he wanted to do nothing but sit, and recover, while Liffey wanted him to be out mowing or digging and painting, and on Sunday he waited for the evening, passing the time with the Sunday papers, so that he could return to London, and real life.

  It would be better, he told himself when Mory and Helen were eased out of the apartment and Liffey and he were together again. He would not need Bella or Miss Martin then. He would not have to justify his infidelities by finding fault with Liffey. He could still see some kind of future for them both—even a rosy one—it was just the present he found difficult, and in particular Friday evenings.

  ‘You’re never at your nicest on Fridays,’ observed Liffey.

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said.

  ‘But not too tired to go up to Mabs and Tucker?’

  ‘No,’ said Richard.

  There was something different about Richard these days, thought Liffey. A kind of snap of power; a glint of ice behind the boyish eyes: she saw that he might indeed become something significant in his organisation. She was not sure she wanted that. They were to have roamed together, hand in hand for ever, through the long tangled grasses of life.

  She sat at Mabs’ dinner table and felt frail, and rather ill, and tired, while Richard and Tucker talked about fertilisers, about which Richard was surprisingly knowledgeable, and milk yields, and Mabs urged Liffey to eat up the gristly, fatty lumps of pork in her plateful of meat stew. Richard thought how peaky Liffey looked, and had a sudden longing for Miss Martin’s solid plumpness. He caught Liffey’s eye, and she smiled at him, and there was a quality of sadness in her smile, as if she mourned a lost innocence.

  Resolutions

  ‘Bella,’ said Richard, later in the week, ‘all this is getting on top of me. It has to stop. It’s not as if it were love.’ Bella just laughed. It was not easy to hurt Bella. She sat on top of him, breasts full and firm, swaying backwards and forwards calmly and slowly and smoking a cigarette, which he supposed was ridiculous but nevertheless appealed to him.

  ‘If it were love,’ said Bella, ‘I wouldn’t be doing it. Love hurts. This is just sex.’

  Richard’s feelings were wounded. He thought she ought to love him. He thought that her not loving him might be dangerous, making him more inclined to love her. He would wait until she loved him and then, having given her back a whole range of feelings she had forgotten that she had, would quietly and gently leave. That was what a man could, and did, do for an older woman.