While Richard, in and out of Miss Martin, passed through the wilds of Cumberland on the way to Edinburgh, Bella and Ray went together to a newly opened fish restaurant in Fulham.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with what I feel for Karen,’ said Ray. ‘I don’t want you to think that, Bella. I don’t want to upset you.’

  ‘The only thing that upsets me,’ said Bella, ‘is your taste.

  Why don’t you fuck her and get it over?’

  Bella rose and left the restaurant, but not before slipping twelve oysters into a plastic bag.

  ‘Where are you taking those?’

  ‘Home to the children.’

  Bella forgot to put the oysters in the refrigerator when she got home and left them on the kitchen table. The cat, an instant replacement of the one run over, ate them and was found ill to the point of death the next morning, and had to be taken by Helga to the vet. It was a journey of two miles but Bella would not let Helga take a taxi. She had to walk.

  ‘The vet’s bill’s going to be bad enough, let alone a taxi!’ ‘Don’t think I’m going to pay the bloody vet’s bill,’ said Ray to Bella, but absently, without acrimony. Really, he could think of little else than Karen: her long, somehow unformed legs, her plump, smooth face, still unmarked by woe and indecision: her little hands: the way she moved about the world, choosing between one happy option and the next: living by choice and not necessity.

  The cat died in the carrier bag on the way to the vet. Helga did not cry, but Tony and Tina did, when they heard the news.

  ‘Supposing it had been us?’ asked Tony. ‘The oysters were meant for us.’

  Everything seemed upset that weekend. Routines were altered and not for the better.

  That Saturday night Carol told her husband that she was going over to Mabs, and made him a nice cup of tea before she went. He did not drink the tea, since the shepherd’s pie she’d made had given him indigestion—the onion was still raw, the mince lumpy and the flour thickening barely cooked—and as a result did not fall asleep over Match of the Day. He heard mice nibbling and rustling and rang Mabs to ask to speak to Carol, and Tucker answered and said no, Carol hadn’t been round. Funny, thought Barry, but quite soon Carol came back and said she hadn’t gone up to Mabs after all but had stopped by her Mum’s, who was having trouble with a bee swarm. The fright, or suspicion, or unease, or whatever it was which had churned round in his heavy, kindly, trusting mind, stirred him strangely, and he paused in the middle of his swift, embarrassed, usually silent lovemaking and asked his wife if she loved him. ‘Of course I do,’ she said.

  ‘Idiot,’ said Mabs to Tucker, when she finally got back to bed. ‘I had to run all the way down to the estate office.

  Haven’t I got enough to do?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell lies for anyone,’ said Tucker.

  ‘Especially not for your sister, who is a married woman but having it off with Dick Hubbard.’

  ‘She fancies him,’ said Mabs. ‘She can’t help herself. And Dick Hubbard’s more use to us than Barry ever will be.

  Thank your lucky stars it’s you I fancy, Tucker.’

  ‘It’d better be,’ said Tucker, ‘or I’d knock his bloody head off, whoever he was. Yours, too.’

  He would have, as well.

  In other rooms at Cadbury Farm Mabs’ children slept, uneasily. They were leftover children; outgrown their usefulness as Mabs’ babies, left to get on with their lives as best they could. Eddie, of all of them, wouldn’t accept his fate. He would sidle up to his mother and muzzle into her crutch, as if trying to get back in. All it did was disgust her. She disliked him for his soppy ways, his running nose, his watery eyes and the dull reproach therein. The others were tougher, or more sensible, and kept their distance and grabbed the baked beans, and shut their eyes and minds to night-time visions of strange people who belonged to long ago. There had been a farm on the site when the Romans came, and uncooperative people there who had to be killed to be quieted, but still weren’t quiet.

  To Tucker, the children were part of the landscape, like the cows and the farm, and the dogs. He hoped that when the boys grew bigger they would help on the farm. He did not see how the girls could be much use to him. Cattle were fed a carefully calculated amount in terms of cost and nourishment, in order to return a profit in milk and meat yield. Sometimes it cost too much to keep the animals alive, and then it was best to slaughter. You knew where you were with animals. But the girls just ate and ate and grew and grew and what return was there in that? Some other man would presently have the benefit of them. To nurture girls seemed to Tucker an absurd philanthropy.

  Mabs slept. Tucker couldn’t.

  Better, thought Tucker, Mabs dreaming beside him, to satisfy the pleasure of begetting via some other man’s purse—Liffey’s body; Richard’s income. Richard was a good enough man on a fine day in a rich season, but not much use when the cold wind blew. In the meantime there was something to be learned from Richard—the fresh wind of new ideas. He could feel them ruffling the surface of his mind. And such was Tucker’s sense of mastery, via Liffey’s body, Liffey’s baby (which he had come to assume, if only from Mabs’ attitude, was his), that he could condescend to Richard, secretly; while Richard condescended to him, openly. Tucker thought he would visit Liffey again, before long, so she did not forget.

  Tucker grew sleepy. He saw the world was composed of virgin ground: of furrows waiting to be ploughed. Seed to be dropped, watered, nourished: then to grow. That was the wonder of it. Perhaps if Mabs was to have her baby, visiting Liffey again was not a good idea. Perhaps a man used his fertility up: burying himself too often in already fertilised ground might weaken his capacity. Tucker would resist the temptation, which was, after all, not the temptation of the flesh, but the temptation of laughing at Richard. Who spoke well, wrote well, thought well, earned well, dressed well, but could not look after a wife.

  Tucker laughed and slept.

  The sun, rising in the east, sent streams of early light westward and caught the Tor in brilliance, beneath lowering dawn clouds.

  Sixteen Weeks

  The baby weighed five ounces and was six inches long. It had limbs with working joints, and fingers and toes, each with its completing nail. It was clearly male. It lay curled in its amniotic sac, legs crossed, knees up towards its lowered head, which it sheltered with little arms. Its lifeline, the umbilical cord, curled round from its stomach and into the nourishing placenta. The baby stirred, and moved, and exercised, according to its own will and not its mother’s: a little being within a greater being, grown out of it, and from it, but now itself, no longer part of the greater whole. It moved, but Liffey could not detect the movements: she would have to wait another month or so for that.

  It was time to see the doctor again. Liffey remarked on it to Mabs.

  ‘You look healthy enough to me,’ said Mabs.

  ‘They like you to have a check-up every month,’ said Liffey.

  ‘They like to claim their various allowances,’ said Mabs, ‘and keep their clinics open and their files full of forms, and if they’re men they like peeking up your insides. Is it Dr Southey you have? Tucker won’t let me see him. They got him for indecent assault up in London. That’s why he’s working down here.’

  The baby laughed, amused. Liffey heard.

  ‘And when you think of that thalidomide business,’ said Mabs, ‘I think it’s best to keep out of their way. Those poor little babies with flippers. Baby kicking yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  All the same Liffey used the telephone to make the appointment and Mabs was annoyed. Liffey was proving more difficult to control than she had thought possible. The way to bring her back to heel, of course, would be to send Tucker down again, but that was now out of the question. Mabs felt hollow and cold in her insides. She missed the movement of the kicks and shruggings of an unborn child. Tucker filled her up a little, from time to time, but it was not enough. And if Tucker went to Liffey, ploughed about in those already warm and packed places, she might find herself trying to kill the baby by killing the mother. And that she recognised would be wicked. The baby, being Tucker’s was hers to kill. Liffey was not.

  Mabs offered to drive Liffey in to the surgery. Liffey declined.

  ‘The walk will do me good.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Mabs, and Liffey felt she had behaved ungraciously. Liffey felt it was important to stay on the right side of Mabs. She now looked to her, as a pregnant girl will to an older and more experienced woman, for advice, company and reassurance. She recognised that the advice was often bad, and the reassurance marred by a blunt tactlessness, but she did not doubt Mabs’ good will.

  All the same, if she could help it, she did not travel in Mabs’ car. Mabs’ driving frightened her, and the way she was jolted over the rutted tracks made her worry for the baby, and there was something about the car itself which worried her. She thought it was haunted.

  Cadbury Farm, too, was haunted, but in a more positive way. It was suffused with a sense of activity, both past and present. It had sprung out of the ground two thousand or so years ago, had fallen down, been raised again, been added to, a new beam put here, a rotten one replaced there, the generations passing the while; children born, others dying, genes shifting and sorting all the time within, languidly, but to a steady, beating, almost cheerful purpose. But the Pierces’ car had none of this richness. It sopped up the energies of its occupants—Tucker’s fixed and narrow will, Mabs’ flourishing discontent, the children’s sly and secretive passions—and all to no purpose, except the eventual disintegration of plastic upholstery and the rusting of metal parts.

  Dr Southey thought Liffey looked puffier and heavier than she ought. She seemed tired and anxious.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be better off back in London, with your husband?’

  ‘There are problems about that.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘Oh, just practical. Not matrimonial.’ She believed it, too.

  ‘Anyway I love the country.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It makes me feel more important.’ She had the capacity to surprise him. He looked forward to her visits.

  She lay on the couch, her stomach bare. Her uterus, normally hidden away in the pelvis, had now risen to a point halfway between her pubic mound and her umbilicus. His hand felt it out. He thought her dates were correct: the uterus was at the expected height for sixteen weeks.

  ‘I have pains in my side,’ she said, ‘low down.’

  ‘They’ll go away.’

  ‘What are they?’

  The pains were caused by the shrinking of the corpus luteum of her ovaries—no longer required to produce the progesterone which had inhibited the shedding of the uterus wall during the first months of her pregnancy. The placenta had taken over the task. It was a sign that all was well, not bad. He said as much.

  ‘You’re sure it’s nothing wrong?’ she insisted.

  ‘Of course it’s not.’

  ‘I do worry about it. I’m not used to worrying. I used to leave it to Richard to do the worrying. He always worried about his parents, if there was nothing else. Now he seems to have stopped and I’ve started.’

  She laughed, rather nervous and embarrassed, reminding him of a hen gone broody, changing its nature from something greedy and silly into something prepared to die rather than expose its eggs to harm, looking out at the world with a stubborn, desperate wisdom. And for what? To lead ten fluffy chicks back into the hen coop—and forget them a week or so later.

  ‘Is there any treatment?’ Liffey asked.

  ‘The passage of time,’ he said. ‘Come and see me next week if you’re still worried.’

  Liffey went home.

  The pains went. Others came. Liffey’s ovaries were enlarged and developed a series of small cysts, which may have accounted for some of the fleeting pains. Her vaginal secretions increased; she passed water frequently.

  ‘Yes, but why?’ she made a special journey to ask him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, impatiently, ‘these things just happen to pregnant ladies.’

  He was busy: he had two patients with terminal cancer. He wished he could keep his respect for pregnant women. They seemed to him to belong so completely to the animal kingdom that it was almost strange to hear them talk.

  The weather turned cold. A wet west wind blew day after day and took the blossom from the trees.

  Liffey’s body, which normally contained ten pints of blood, now had some twelve pints coursing through it, the better to supply her uterus and markedly swelling breasts, but diluting the concentration of red cells therein. Liffey became anaemic.

  Mabs knew Liffey was anaemic because Carol’s friend worked in the laboratory at Glastonbury and did the blood counts. The doctor prescribed Liffey iron tablets, and she took them, although they gave her indigestion.

  Mabs felt that time was working for her. Mabs comforted herself with the thought that perhaps all she need do was wait, and the baby would leave of its own free will, and natural justice would be served.

  ‘Why are you hiccuping?’ Richard asked.

  Sometimes he worried for Liffey’s health, in case the punishment of the Gods was diverted from him to her. He was having altogether too good a time.

  ‘It’s the iron pills. I don’t think I’ll take them any more.’

  ‘Don’t be irresponsible, Liffey. You ought to be thinking of the baby, not yourself.’

  Richard had a few bad weekends after that. His skies clouded over, for no apparent reason. Nothing had changed, of course, except his attitude to them. He was concerned for Liffey and her baby, and now his concern afflicted him. There were enough things in the world to worry about, surely, without the gratuitous addition of another? Parents, job, income, the car, accommodation; worries heaped in upon him one upon another: wives, surely, were meant to decrease the load of anxiety, not increase it with anaemia, with hiccuping, and puffy eyes, and the threat of the thing within? Miss Martin implied as much, all week. Hard to throw it off, at weekends.

  The curse of the irrational, moreover, descended upon him. He dug the garden, he planted peas and beans; he hammered and painted when he meant to do nothing but rest and relax and compare cider and home-made wines with Tucker. He saw that the chains of fatherhood were already around him: he was preparing for the baby. As well be a humble cock-sparrow lurching to and fro, to and fro, straw in the beak for the nest: exhausted, bored and foolish, helpless in the face of his nature. Richard pulled a muscle in his back, and blamed Liffey.

  Bella sent him to an osteopath, who made it better, and the next Friday Richard returned to Honeycomb Cottage with a car loaded with food and drink, and was loving and kind and considerate.

  ‘We can’t go on living like this,’ he said. ‘We don’t see nearly enough of each other. But, oh, Liffey, London is such a terrible place.’ And he reeled off tales of vandalism and violence: a colleague’s wife mugged on her way home; someone’s daughter’s friend raped; someone else’s apartment burgled; lead pollution in the air; the pale faces of children; the grey look of the elderly.

  Liffey’s words, once upon a time. Now Richard’s.

  Mabs and Tucker came over for a drink. Richard sat with his arm round Liffey, and Liffey, blooming in his new-found protection, wore a smock and looked really pregnant.

  ‘You are looking well,’ said Mabs. ‘How’s the anaemia?’

  ‘Much better,’ said Liffey.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Mabs. ‘It’s the elderberry wine’s done that.’

  Mabs gave Richard a bottle of nettle wine to take back to London.

  ‘Give some to your secretary,’ said Mabs. ‘Perhaps it will sweeten her.’

  ‘Take more than drink to sweeten Miss Martin,’ said Richard automatically.

  Richard kept his second appointment with the osteopath, and the back pain returned. He decided to spend the next weekend in London. Ray had gone off to Brussels on a free fish-tasting excursion for two, but taking Karen with him instead of Bella, who had a dentist’s appointment she couldn’t miss. Bella was left at home, angry, which meant sexually extremely active: and Miss Martin’s Jeff was also away for the weekend at an Encounter Therapy course, which meant that Miss Martin was free all Friday night, and her mother staying with relatives, so there was an empty house available for their lovemaking. Richard told Bella that he was with Liffey on Friday night, Miss Martin that he was with Liffey on Saturday night, and Liffey that he was at a weekend conference on permitted saline additives. Unfortunately, as often happened when he stayed away from home, his potency was unaccountably diminished and both Miss Martin and Bella were disappointed. Moreover Miss Martin had looked forward to making him a proper English breakfast, with bacon, eggs and sausages, and not the bread and jam and coffee with which Bella and Liffey apparently fobbed him off—but Richard only toyed with the plateful, and left the sausage altogether, and she felt he found her home rather ordinary and suburban. But of course he had hurt his back, and that clearly affected his enthusiasms—sexual, culinary and aesthetic. Richard blamed the osteopath.

  Trouble

  Mabs thought she might be pregnant. Her period was late. She felt heavy. She brought the children home iced lollies, and took Eddie to the dentist and let him sit on her knee in the waiting room.