‘Why, Liffey?’ Richard sounded quite cross.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve been messing with Tucker?’ He was joking.

  He sliced into the next puffball and Liffey thought of her own pale, stretched flesh.

  ‘Supposing the baby starts early?’ she asked. ‘Supposing I start to bleed.’

  ‘Liffey, you are making ever such heavy weather over this pregnancy.’

  ‘Sorry. I suppose London’s full of girls just dropping their babies in a corner of the office, and going straight back to the typewriter?’

  ‘Well, yes. More or less. That sounds like the old Liffey.’

  The old Liffey. Little lithe silly Liffey. Liffey remembered her old self with nostalgia, but knew it was gone for good. Tucker had driven it out of her. Mabs flew shrieking through her mind, perched on a broomstick; heavy, smooth, nyloned legs ready to push and shove and get her in the stomach. All Richard did was slice puffballs, and smile, and pretend that nothing had changed. But it had. Richard had changed, too. He had grown from a boy into a man and she was not sure that she liked the man.

  But she had to. He paid the rent. He bought the food. She and the baby had to have a home. And he was the baby’s father. Richard, I like you. I love you.

  Please, dear God, let me like you, love you, trust you.

  ‘Don’t you love the smell of puffballs?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Wonderful!’ said Liffey. ‘Of the earth, earthy.’

  Tucker, with earth beneath his nails. That was not love, nor lust, nor folly, nor spite: that was nothing to do with the will, with the desire for good or bad, that was simply what had happened. An open door, and someone coming through it, further and further until he was not just inside the room but inside her as well.

  ‘I don’t know what you had to go and ask them over for,’ grumbled Mabs. She was preparing a distillation of motherwort for herself, and syrup of buckthorn for Debbie, who complained of stomach pains, presumably due to constipation. Debbie was locked in her room for not having properly cleaned the kitchen and was using the pains as an excuse.

  Mabs was in good spirits. Tucker had taken her to a dance at Taunton. She’d had her hair done at the hairdresser and bought a new flowered skirt.

  The milk yield accepted and paid for by the Milk Marketing Board was higher than it had ever been; the cattle sheds could be retiled: it had been a good spring for silage, and a fine summer for hay. Apart from Liffey’s baby, and her own inability to conceive, it might almost be called a lucky year.

  The bad times were nearly over. Mabs felt that once Liffey’s baby was delivered she would start her own. That was the way things went. And she confidently expected Liffey to die under the surgeon’s knife.

  Mabs gave Tucker a twist of thornapple in his elderberry wine, which made him mellow and complaisant, and took the edge out of his complaints, and she felt it was rather an improvement. His lovemaking lasted longer, too.

  Early on Sunday morning Ray took Tony out for a walk. They went up the hill and stopped at the point where there was an excellent view of the Tor. As they paused, and puffed, for neither were in good condition, they saw a round red spinning disc of considerable size but unclear distance from them, move towards them, move away again, vanish, reappear, shift colour from red to orange, and depart again, not to reappear.

  Ray and Tony were silent.

  ‘That was a flying saucer,’ said Ray, eventually.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Dad,’ said Tony, embarrassed. ‘Anyway don’t call them flying saucers. They’re UFOs.’

  ‘But you do agree we saw one?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Tony, wretchedly.

  Ray ran back to report his sighting, and had to wake a sleeping house to do so. Bella was angry.

  ‘Your brain’s gone to jelly,’ she shouted. ‘You’re so afraid of your own mortality you’ve taken to seeing things.’

  ‘It was real, Bella.’

  ‘Tony, did you see the same thing as your father?’

  ‘There was something, Mum, but it could have been a fireball or a shooting star or something.’

  Ray took hold of Tony and shook him.

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Bella, ‘that’s the first physical contact you’ve had with your son since the day he was born.’ Ray stopped shaking.

  ‘Everything wonderful in my life,’ he said to Bella, sadly, ‘you destroy. I can’t even see a flying saucer but you entirely spoil and diminish the event.’ ‘UFO,’ said Tony.

  The quarrel continued until it was impossible for Bella and Ray to stay under the same roof. Tony and Tina wandered in the garden. Bella demanded that Richard take her to the station at once, and Ray got in the car at the last moment and Liffey did what she could to comfort Tony and Tina. Their parents did not have the spiritual energy left to say goodbye.

  Bella got to her publisher’s party.

  Richard was laughing when he got home.

  ‘Oh Liffey, darling,’ he said, ‘how lucky we are. We’ve had our hard times but things are going to be better from now on.’

  He touched no wood as he spoke.

  The Unexpected

  Sun glazed, flowers glowed, bees droned. Richard and Liffey walked down the lane from Honeycomb Cottage to Cadbury Farm, on the way to Sunday lunch. They held hands. Tony and Tina, taken aback by their parents’ sudden departure, walked behind, subdued.

  Now, in late summer, after a season of Liffey’s tending, the cottage might have graced the top of a chocolate box. Hollyhocks, roses and wallflowers tumbled together against the whitewashed walls; swallows dived and soared above the thatch; Tucker’s black and white cows grazed serenely in the field behind; down on the stream moorhens paddled against the current, in the dappled shadow of weeping willows. Peas and beans and carrots flourished in the small vegetable patch: and there would have been potatoes in the field had it not been for the cows.

  ‘You do make the best of everything, Liffey,’ said Richard, contentedly, as they walked.

  He carried a puffball with him. It was tucked under his arm. It seemed to stare ahead, as he walked; there were, by chance, blemishes spaced like eyes and mouth on its smooth surface. He was taking it as a gift for Mabs.

  ‘I’m not sure she’ll appreciate it,’ Liffey said.

  ‘But they’re so nourishing,’ Richard replied, ‘and so delicious. I’ll convert her.’

  They came to the end of the wood. The long grey building of Cadbury Farm lay before them, with its crumbling dry stone walls, and the neglected outhouses, with their collapsing red tiled roofs. Away to the right of them, the ground swept down and across the levels of the valley, past small villages and hedgerowed meadows, threaded by ribbons of road, where toy cars and lorries trundled, to where the Tor rose, suddenly and dramatically, at odds with the gentle landscape which surrounded it.

  ‘They say there’s a magnetic force line straight from the Tor to Jerusalem,’ said Richard.

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Can’t remember,’ said Richard. It had been Vanessa. She had told him to find a pine tree on a ley line and lean against it, whenever his system needed revitalising. She had told him about twisted apple trees and yews which marked the radiating force lines from the Tor; about the old roads between Stonehenge and Glastonbury; about how it was no coincidence that he lived in London in the shadow of Primrose Hill—also a seat of power—and in the country, in the shadow of the Tor. Deciding, by virtue of his dwelling place, that Richard must be a rather special person after all, she had allowed him to sleep with her, and declared herself revitalised by the encounter and not—as she had feared—enervated. But she would not repeat the experience, no matter how his by now practised hand strayed over her long, young, cool body. Once was enough—she said. They knew all there was about one another now—she’d as soon recharge herself against a pine tree or a ley line. But could he get her another modelling job?

  Richard thought he probably couldn’t, but since then had regarded the Tor with more respect, as something with spiritual meaning, which could bring good things about, rather than a tourist trap for ruined abbey and UFO freaks. Things had gone wrong, since then. He’d talked to Vanessa about Liffey.

  ‘I didn’t know you were married,’ she’d said, surprised. ‘I don’t want to get into all that scene. You should have told me.’

  ‘I didn’t think marriage mattered to you lot, one way or another.’

  But it had seemed to; she had said she’d ring him when she’d worked things out, but hadn’t rung: and Richard was vaguely sorry, since Vanessa was restful, and her expectations from sex so few that he was bound to please, and his attempts at seduction for that reason unclouded but relieved as well. All that was behind him now.

  ‘You’re not tired?’ he asked, now, solicitously.

  ‘No,’ said Liffey. But she was. From time to time she had a dragging pain in her abdomen.

  Labour

  Thirty-eight weeks. The average duration of pregnancy is forty weeks, but can vary from woman to woman, and from one pregnancy to another, and from one marriage to another. Each pregnancy differs: each woman differs. Liffey’s baby was ready. All through life the muscles of a woman’s uterus, like the muscles in the rest of her body, contract and relax from time to time, lest they waste away. All through pregnancy uterine contractions occur, every half hour or less, for about half a minute at a time. In late pregnancy, they become noticeable, though not painful: they are known as Branston Hicks contractions. When labour begins, these contractions become regular, stronger, and more forceful. They last for forty seconds or more: they mount to a crescendo more slowly, fade away more gradually. As labour progresses, uterine contractions come at shorter and shorter intervals; they are designed to eliminate the canal of the cervix without damaging its muscle, incorporating it into the lower uterine segment, so that the baby can be expelled. The upper uterine segment, where the contraction begins, and which consists almost entirely of muscle, behaves during labour in a unique way, known as retraction. It shortens itself slightly after every contraction, thus increasing its pulling power on the lower segment, which is already much stretched and weakened by the baby it contains. The pressures produced inside are considerable. The cervix, as the canal above it is, little by little, inexorably, drawn up, widens, or dilates, eventually making an opening some nine-and-a-half centimetres in diameter, enough for the baby’s head to pass through—all going well with the baby, that is. This first stage of labour, as it is called, takes a different length of time in different women, varying from two hours to twenty-four but with some exceptions either side. It is not possible to anticipate the duration of a labour, nor whether the contractions will be experienced as discomfort or pain: but as a rough working estimate it requires some one hundred and fifty contractions to produce a first child, about seventy-five for a second or third child, and about fifty for a fourth.

  Liffey, walking down the lane with Richard, had a mild backache, and a slight dragging pain in her tummy: but so she’d had from time to time over the past few weeks. Earlier in the morning she’d had an uprush of energy: had swept and cleaned and even scrubbed, under and around her warring guests, but this had now passed, leaving her soft and languid.

  ‘What a pity,’ said Mabs, when they got to the farm. ‘I was expecting your smart London friends. So was Tucker. Weren’t you, Tucker!’

  ‘They had to get back in a hurry,’ said Richard.

  ‘London folk are always in a hurry,’ said Mabs, shooing Tina and Tony out into the yard. ‘I suppose my invitation wasn’t good enough for the likes of them.’

  She was annoyed. Richard offered her the puffball by way of pacification. It made her laugh.

  ‘God-awful things,’ she said. ‘You’re quite mad, Richard.’ But she consented to slice it, a little later, and place it under the roast to catch the drippings, and serve it like Yorkshire pudding.

  ‘Just because I never have,’ said Mabs, nobly, ‘is no reason why I never should.’ Her annoyance seemed to have evaporated. She smiled at Liffey, and pulled back a chair for her, saying, ‘Don’t go into the parlour, since it’s only you. Stay and talk while I work.’

  Tucker served elderberry wine, clearing a space on the crowded table for bottle and glasses.

  ‘How are you keeping, Liffey?’ he asked. ‘No pains?’

  ‘No more than usual,’ said Liffey.

  ‘She’s not allowed to produce for another two weeks,’ said

  Richard. ‘I can’t take time off until then.’

  ‘You’re not going to be there,’ said Mabs, in horror.

  ‘Fathers are supposed to be,’ said Richard, helplessly.

  ‘Liffey, you wouldn’t want him to see you in that state?’ demanded Mabs.

  Both Mabs and Tucker wore their Sunday best. Tucker was wearing a collar and tie, which somehow diminished him. It made him seem uneasy and ordinary, and grimy rather than weathered, as if the ingraining accomplished by sun and wind was the mark of poverty. Mabs wore an oyster coloured silk blouse, already splashed by juices from the rib of beef she was roasting and the sprouts she was stewing, but her hair was pulled firmly and neatly back, showing her broad face to advantage. She has lost weight recently, Liffey decided, and that made her high cheekbones more prominent and her dark eyes larger and more glittery than usual. Moreover, Mabs, who seldom so much as looked in a mirror, but saw herself, as it were, defined by sky and hills, had today outlined them with black.

  A witch, thought Liffey. A witch preparing for witchery. The ceremonial has begun.

  Nonsense, thought Liffey. My neighbour, about whom I sometimes get strange fancies, connected, no doubt with my pregnancy. My neighbour, the salt of the earth.

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to apply,’ said Liffey. ‘I’m going to have a Caesarian, anyway. Or so they say.’

  ‘They only say you might, Liffey,’ said Richard. ‘Don’t exaggerate.’

  ‘It’s natural for her to get nervous,’ said Tucker, ‘at this stage.’

  ‘The way I look at it,’ said Mabs, ‘a man’s place during childbirth is down at the pub.’

  Everyone laughed. Even Liffey.

  Tony and Tina had been given a bag of crisps each and sent out to play with the others. The others were nowhere to be seen, so they sat on a wall and swung their legs and waited, with some alarm, for further events to transpire. They were hungry, but relieved not to have to sit down with the grown-ups for dinner. They were accustomed to the stripped pine furniture, uncluttered lines and primary colours of home, and found the rich dark mahogany and oak, the dust, and litter and the crumbling walls of the Pierces’ kitchen oppressive. They were accustomed, moreover, to adults who talked to them, and who did not offer them crisps in lieu of conversation. They were accustomed to Richard, but did not trust him; liked Liffey but judged that she was hardly in a condition to look after them; were angry with their parents for abandoning them; and missed Helga. They munched and crunched their crisps, and were silent, faces impassive.

  Mabs had got their names wrong: had taken Tina for a boy, Tony for a girl.

  ‘You can’t tell which is which,’ she complained, in their hearing. ‘I’d be ashamed to let my children out, looking like that.’

  Debbie was locked in her room again. Today the reason given was that she failed to clean her father’s Sunday shoes. She lay with her legs drawn up to her chest, occasionally vomiting and groaning. She had had another dose of buckthorn to cure her constipation.

  Buckthorn was a tall shrub which grew in the woods around. It had little creamy white flowers in spring and inviting black berries in autumn; and grew, in these parts, without thorns. The thorny kind, or Spinachristi, provided Christ’s crown of thorns; Mabs’ kind, though without thorns, provided a powerful cascara-like purgative, which she prepared, with sugar and ginger, from the dried berries, and with which, as her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother before her, she dosed her children, doing them one damage or another. It was a local custom so to do. Dr Southey would suggest to mothers that they keep it for cows, but they politely agreed and kept on dosing. Sometimes he thought he would emigrate, and take a post in Central Africa, where superstition and witchcraft would be something clear and definite to be grappled with, not a running, secret thread through the fabric of life.

  Eddie played silently in the corridor outside Debbie’s room. He crouched on the floor, listening to her groans, zooming his hand over the rug like a dive-bombing plane. There were blue bruises on his upper arms. Eddie was waiting for Audrey to come back from church. Audrey had a nice voice and a natural ear and had joined the church choir, partly because she could make 35p a wedding and more for funerals and partly because she fancied the curate, Mr Simon Eaves. She looked at him with large, glittery, inviting eyes and he struggled to believe there was no invitation in them; she was a child.

  Today Audrey asked if she could stay behind after church and speak to him, and Mr Eaves felt he could not very well refuse, and also that it would be prudent not to see her alone.