‘Well,’ said Mabs, preparing the puffball for the oven, ‘I don’t know about you lot, but I’m certainly looking forward to the baby. You’ve really made me feel quite broody, Liffey.’

  She sliced into the puffball with too blunt a knife, so that the edge crumbled as if it were a ripe Stilton she was parting, and not an edible fungi.

  As she cut through the flesh, not cleanly, but bruising and chipping on the way, she stared at Liffey’s stomach.

  ‘I’m imagining it,’ thought Liffey. If she were doing it on purpose, surely Richard would have noticed? But Richard smiled amiably on, his mind on good red meat juices and the creamy texture of roasted puffball. And Tucker stared into space and drank.

  ‘But why does Mabs hate me?’ wondered Liffey. ‘I am not a hateful person. I am a nice person. Everyone likes me. They may forget me, but if I’m around, they like me.’

  ‘I have slept with Mabs’ husband but Mabs doesn’t know that. Mabs can’t know. Tucker was lying.’

  When the knife had pierced to the very centre of the puffball Mabs gave it another twist.

  ‘She hates my baby, too. She wants to kill it.’

  Liffey looked at Richard for help. Richard was speaking. ‘Puffballs are truly amazing. Nature’s richest bounty. And you can hang them up and dry them, and then they make wonderful firelighters. Did you know that, Tucker?’ ‘Can’t say I did,’ said Tucker. ‘We use a gas poker to light our fires, in any case.’

  He smiled at Richard as he spoke, as a grown-up might smile at a rather slow child; and then he looked at Liffey with a sympathetic expression on his face, which would have been pleasant enough except that Mabs was watching Tucker watching her, and Mabs’ eyes seemed not just brown, dark brown, but deepest black.

  Things fell into place.

  ‘Mabs knows Tucker comes up to see me. Tucker wasn’t lying. Mabs knows. Knows he came up again, and I let him.’

  Make it a dream.

  Dinner is served, in the cold dining room, on the French polished table. It is a room that is hardly ever used.

  ‘So, Liffey,’ said Mabs brightly. Tucker carved. Mabs served. A face appeared briefly and hungrily at the window, and disappeared again. Tina’s. ‘Only two weeks more to go. I expect you’ll be glad when it’s over.’

  ‘I like being pregnant,’ said Liffey, brightly. Liffey knew that she must now assert her will against Mabs: must oppose bad with good: must send out against her such spiritual forces as she could muster. Mabs had a strong, evil battalion already assembled: as she doled out mixed thawed peas and carrots, and roast and mashed potatoes both, she doled out spite, anger, enmity and mystery. They were hers to distribute.

  Wonderful dinner! Liffey said so.

  Liffey must be cheerful, honest, ordinary, positive and kind. Then all might still be well. She must set up a bulwark of good will. Her defence must be an armoury of opposites. She had no attacking weapons. She could not love Mabs, who had stuck a knife through Liffey, into Liffey’s baby, and twisted.

  Mabs, who limped when you drove a nail through her footprint.

  Ha-ha.

  Yes, Richard. Mabs, witch. Do you know? Are you part of it, too?

  O madness! Paranoia! Pregnancy!

  Liffey looked down at her plate. On Richard’s plate, and Tucker’s, were good thick lean and shapely slices of roast rib of beef. On her, Liffey’s plate, was a little mound of fat and gristle.

  Mabs watched Liffey watching her plate. Liffey raised her eyes and stared at Mabs.

  Mabs smiled. Mabs knew. Mabs knew that Liffey knew that Mabs knew.

  Richard noticed nothing, or pretended to notice nothing. He was fishing for more puffball slices with Tucker’s carving fork.

  ‘Give Liffey a decent piece of meat,’ said Tucker, mildly. ‘She doesn’t want too much at this stage,’ said Mabs, ‘do you Liffey?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Liffey, ‘really fine with what I’ve got.’

  Well done, Liffey.

  Of course what it’s all about, thought Liffey, with the calmness born of certainty, is that Mabs thinks it’s Tucker’s baby.

  ‘Have some puffball, Liffey,’ said Mabs, ‘now Richard’s found it. I was hoping he’d forget but no such luck.’ ‘No, thank you,’ said Liffey. Ah, that was wrong. She should have accepted, devoured her own flesh and blood. Or at any rate her own white, bloodless flesh. The life blood drained away. Too late.

  ‘Liffey,’ said Richard, ‘you must at least taste. I insist. After all the trouble everyone’s been to.’

  Eat, said the baby. You must choose now not between good and bad, but between the lesser of evils. Eat, smile, hope.

  ‘Really, Liffey,’ chided Richard, ‘you’re supposed to be eating for two.’

  ‘Don’t upset her,’ said Tucker. ‘Not in her condition.’

  ‘It’s an entirely natural process,’ said Richard. ‘Nothing to worry about. African mothers go into the bush, have their babies, pick them up and go straight back to work in the fields.’

  They all looked at Liffey, to see how she would take this.

  ‘And then they die,’ said Liffey, before she could stop herself. Open a chink to let doubt out, and a tide of ill will would surge back in.

  Bright, brave, bold! That’s the way, Liffey. If ever you fought, fight now.

  Liffey laughed, to show she didn’t mean it.

  ‘Exactly when is the baby due?’ asked Mabs.

  ‘October 10th,’ said Richard for Liffey.

  Mabs got up and rummaged in a drawer amongst old batteries, dried-out pens, bills, string, ancient powder puffs and tubes of this and that with stubborn tops, and rusted skewers, and brought out a leaflet the cat had walked upon with muddy paws. ‘The doctor gave me this,’ she said. ‘After the fifth baby, in just about as many years. He said I might work it out for myself.’

  ‘Work what out?’ Tucker was nervous.

  ‘When it was, you know, conceived. It’s wonderful the way they can tell, these days. They know everything there is to know in hospitals.’

  ‘It was back in December or January, some time,’ said Liffey, swiftly, vaguely.

  ‘According to this,’ said Mabs, ‘it was over Christmas.’

  ‘We moved in on January 7th,’ said Liffey, thankfully. ‘So you did,’ said Mabs. ‘Do you remember, Richard? What a terrible time you both had? You had to rush straight off back to London, Richard, didn’t you, and then that weekend poor Liffey had an upset stomach. I remember clearly thinking, you poor things; if you expected a second honeymoon, you certainly weren’t getting one then. Such lovebirds you seemed. Of course if Liffey was pregnant that explains her upset stomach.’

  ‘Yes I expect it did,’ said Liffey.

  ‘Nothing to do with my cooking after all,’ laughed Mabs. Then she seemed to look at the leaflet more carefully. ‘No, wait a minute. Christmas was your last period. The baby must have been conceived just around the time you moved in. I must say, Richard, you don’t lose much time! In between all that running around and train catching. Remember?’

  Richard remembered very well. The days were seared into his memory.

  ‘Of course Tucker was over a lot, helping Liffey out,’ said Mabs, into the silence. ‘That’s so, isn’t it Tucker?’

  Mabs laughed. Tucker grunted.

  ‘Of course you London people are different,’ said Mabs, ‘but I don’t see anyone round here so easy about rearing another man’s child.’

  Nobody laughed or grunted or spoke.

  Richard blinked, as if by shutting his eyes he would then wake up into a more real and more believable world.

  Upstairs Debbie screamed, but the sound went unnoticed.

  ‘Do shut up, Mabs,’ said Tucker, ‘or I’ll break your bloody jaw.’

  ‘I think you’d better take me home, Richard,’ said Liffey. ‘I don’t feel very well.’

  The dull pain was gone but the piercing pain now seemed established as a permanent reality and was increasing in intensity. A sizeable segment of placenta had torn away from the uterine wall. Liffey, although ignorant of this fact—indeed, having known remarkably little of what had been going on inside her for the last nine months—nevertheless felt something was going wrong somewhere. Mabs’ allegations and revelations seemed to Liffey, now, of no particular relevance.

  But for Richard, of course, they were.

  ‘Home,’ he said. ‘What do you mean by home, Liffey? I don’t think what we have is a home.’

  Mabs, Liffey realised, was on her feet, arm outstretched, pointing at Liffey: black eyes staring.

  ‘Thief,’ she cried. ‘You stole what was mine. I hope you die.’

  ‘Richard,’ observed Liffey, ‘I do have a pain. I think we ought to go.’

  ‘You can’t pull the wool over my eyes,’ said Richard. ‘What do you think I am? A fool? I could see the way things were going.’ But of course he hadn’t. All the same, the claim to knowledge lessened the humiliation, just a little.

  Tucker spoke.

  ‘No reason to think it’s my baby,’ said Tucker to Richard, man to man. ‘Might be yours: might be mine.’

  Richard turned his blue eyes, no longer merry, but still crinkling, of executive habit, to Liffey’s, and found them abstracted. He slapped her. Her head shook, and her body, but her look of indifference remained.

  ‘Don’t you see what you’ve done!’ shouted Richard. He had trusted Liffey with the better part of his nature, and she had betrayed his trust. There was, he felt, nothing good left in the world. And she had stolen so much of his past as well. She had invalidated so much—the love and concern she had elicited from him; his worry about the growing child; the guilt and inconvenience he had endured; the conscience, and indeed the money, he had expended—all had been for nothing, had meant nothing: had been as little to Liffey as it had been, once, to his mother. And Liffey seemed not even to notice his distress.

  The placenta tore a little further. Liffey’s uterus began to bleed. No doubt Mabs’ curse—for curse it was, a malevolent force directed along a quivering outstretched hand, and not a mere overlooking or ill-wishing—had something to do with it, if only by virtue of the sudden alteration in Liffey’s hormonal levels, as shock and anxiety assailed her, and the rise in her blood pressure occasioned by sudden emotion.

  Liffey was not aware, so far, that she was bleeding. But the pain intensified.

  ‘Take me home, Richard,’ said Liffey.

  Richard was staring at Tucker. Little grimy Tucker in his collar and tie. Richard did not really believe that Tucker, by virtue of his way of life, was his superior. Richard had been playing games, as the rich and confident will do with the humble and struggling. Richard despised Tucker.

  A wife may be unfaithful with a prince, and not be considered defiled. Glory can be transmitted via the genitals. But Tucker!

  ‘Richard,’ Liffey was saying, ‘I have to be looked after.’

  ‘Let him look after you,’ said Richard, and left Mabs and Tucker’s house, head hunched into his shoulders, walking briskly, stonily through the yard, mangy dogs yapping at his crisp blue denim, Tony and Tina falling in behind, up the lane, looking neither to left nor right, to where his car was parked outside Honeycomb Cottage, and piled Tony and Tina in the back, while they protested about hunger and clothes and homework left behind, and drove to London. Quickly, for fear of further pollution, as if evil followed him from the Somerset sky, as if Glastonbury was beaming out some kind of searchlight of dismay, meant especially for him.

  Richard, too, got to Bella’s publishing party in time, but he was feeling sick with misery, resentment and disillusion, and possibly also from Mabs’ dinner, and did not enjoy the party at all. Afterwards he went to see Vanessa, who was pleased to see him, in the way a rather busy person is pleased to see a stray cat, and told him she’d been stoned out of her mind for the last few weeks but had now reformed, and encouraged him to cry gently into the night for his lost Liffey, while she, Vanessa, rang girlfriend after girlfriend to discuss the ethics of whether or not she should own a car, positing the good of comfort against the evil of lead pollution of the sky. He heard himself referred to as a strung-out executive hung up on a wife who was having it off with a cowhand, and fell asleep, reassured by the ease with which words could modify experience.

  Tucker left shortly after Richard did. He just took the car and went.

  ‘You’d better walk on back up to Honeycomb, girl,’ he said as he left. ‘There’ll be no sense out of Mabs for an hour or two.’

  Mabs strode the room, up and down, up and down. She seemed to have forgotten Liffey, who drooped over her belly, willing the pain away. The floor seemed to shake beneath Mabs’ footfall, although surely it was made of solid stone. Mabs seemed larger than life, like a giantess.

  Liffey’s baby was quiet. Liffey knew it was apprehensive: she had not known it like that before. All right, said Liffey to her baby, reassuring where no reassurance was, all right. She made a conscious effort to modify her own mood: to lessen shock and fright, to accept pain and not to fight it, as Madge had once tried to teach her, while Liffey had refused to learn. Little Liffey, long ago, refusing Madge’s knowledge, that the world is hard and you’d better learn to manage it.

  All right, mother, you win.

  Liffey stood up. Blood streamed down her legs. It was bright, almost cheerful.

  ‘Mabs,’ said Liffey, ‘can I use the phone?’

  Thus the habit of politeness spoke, foolishly. Madge would just have grabbed, before worse befell.

  Worse befell—Mabs, barely pausing in her pacing, answered by ripping the telephone wire out of the hall and throwing the receiver across the room and breaking it.

  ‘Mabs,’ said Liffey, ‘I’m bleeding.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mabs.

  Liffey went to the door.

  ‘Tucker,’ she yelled. ‘Tucker!’ There was no reply. There were tyre marks in the dust of the yard. Tony and Tina were gone. A swallow swooped down, and up again, and was gone. It was quiet. The dogs did not yap and prance, as they usually did. They sniffed around, the rich red smell of Liffey’s blood, perhaps too strong and strange for them.

  Liffey had another pain now, of a different kind: a more patient, slow, insistent pain, travelling round from back to front, as the uterus, damaged as it was, began the business of taking up the cervical canal.

  ‘Mabs,’ said Liffey, ‘get me to hospital.’

  ‘Can’t,’ said Mabs. ‘The car’s gone.’

  There was a trail of blood wherever Liffey moved.

  ‘Mabs,’ said Liffey, ‘I’ll die.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mabs.

  Missions of Mercy

  Audrey put her hand trustingly into that of the curate. Hers was warm and small. His was cold and bony. They were alone in the vestry, and he wished they were not. ‘What’s bothering you, Audrey?’

  Audrey sang loud and lustily in the choir, but gave the impression, in church, of being some kind of emissary from a foreign power, and not a particularly friendly one at that. It might, he thought, have had something to do with the way her eyes roamed, with prurient speculation, over the males in the congregation. Most of them were elderly.

  ‘It’s my sister Debbie. She’s ill. She needs the doctor.’

  ‘Then surely your mother will fetch one?’

  ‘My mum’s not like that.’

  ‘But why come to me? Why not go straight to the doctor?’

  He knew the answer even as he asked. Audrey did not even bother to reply. Audrey fancied him. She did not fancy the doctor. He wished he were back in theological college. He did not know why he felt so helpless. Audrey’s hand, which he had thought to be so childish, moved like an adult’s in his, suggestively.

  ‘My mum says Debbie’s just constipated, but I know she’s not, because she keeps messing her pants, and I’m the one who washes them so I should know. And my mum keeps on giving her buckthorn.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s all right for the cows, I suppose. It’s just berries she boils up. Makes your mouth green.’

  The curate took back his hand. Audrey looked disappointed and concluded the interview. ‘Anyway,’ she said, going, ‘I really am worried about Debbie.’